Before…
In little over an hour I will be leaving work to head to our 12 week scan. I am both excited and nervous in equal measure. Excited to see our little baby once more, and to find out that everything is OK.
Nervous in case it isn’t.
Ignorance is bliss…
After…
PHEW! We saw our tiny little baby and it has all its arms and legs and a head and a heartbeat! It’s amazing the change in just 4 weeks from a bean to a person.
The baby was positioned bum up, with its chin on its chest, and the nurse had to poke me quite hard to try to get it to move into a better position for taking scan measurements. It would seem we have one lazy baby.
There was a medical student in the room with us, so I think we got to hear a bit more of the analysis than perhaps we otherwise would have done. I got to see my placenta – which, having worked on them for 3 years in my previous research post, was very exciting (Margaret, you get first dibs at this one!) – and we found out that the fluid on the back of our baby’s neck was looking normal.
This might sound like an odd observation, but it is one of the screening tools they use to test for Downs Syndrome. We opted not to have the full Downs test, as we would continue with the pregnancy regardless of the outcome. It is just one of a number of ailments possible at this stage, so we didn’t feel the need to single it out. But if the thickness of the neck fluid is large, they still note it as an abnormality even without the official tests, so it was good to know that it all looked normal.
They double-checked a cyst on my ovary that they’d first picked up at our emergency 8-week scan, and it had decreased in size, which was also good news.
So all-in-all, it is good news! I feel like I can now finally start to relax a bit and indulge in the idea of our very own baby. I told my boss on Thursday, so now it’s official. I’m due on 25th October, two days before John’s birthday. But don’t worry, he says we can send it back if it comes on 27th, so that’s OK.
Even now I am just sat staring at this blurry black and white picture of our future child, and I can’t believe it’s growing inside of me. I spent so many years thinking this wouldn’t be possible. Fearing to dream, and fighting just to muster the hope of the chance of it. My hope now is that this is an encouragement to others in similar situations. But not in a glib way. I am well aware that we have had it easy by comparison with some, and but for the will of God we may have fallen on the other side of the narrow fertility line.
There are no guarantees.
But hope is good. Petrifying. But good.
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