Lemonade

Wow, what a week.

Big scares have been had and resolved, statistics have been doled out and adjusted and retracted and yet irretrievably absorbed into the psyche, markers have been, well, marked, babies have been looked at and looked at and looked at, Mama has been poked and prodded and gooped up and wiped clean and sent hither and thither. Tears have been shed and anger and panic have been felt and decisions have been made. And relief is beginning to be felt.

Last Thur, week 18, we had our big level 2 ultrasound where the technician takes measurements of every possible aspect of baby A and then of baby B, saying nothing while doing so. Nothing, while measuring aspects of baby A's brain again and again and again. Nothing, while the two bright white dots appear in Baby B's heart. Nothing, while the strange reptilian images flash on the screen, freeze, and disappear. Then the doctor comes in and measures some more of the exact same things, and just before Bruno is about to remove the last of his hair from his head, finally tells us. She has found a soft marker for Down Syndrome on Baby B's heart: an echogenic focus. And, more alarmingly, the tech captured a shot of Baby A's heart that seems to show a potentially fatal congenital heart defect, but the doctor can't repeat the tech's findings and thinks it is just a bad camera angle, but, just to be on the safe side, she wants to send us today, now, to get a fetal echocardiogram. Just to be sure.

Bruno looks like he is about to faint. I can tell the reins have slipped his hands and the horses of his fear are now running wild. He has abandoned the sanity ship, forgotten his life jacket and jumped straight into the roiling sea of assuming the very worst. Poor guy.

Through something that could alternately be called motherly intuition, abject denial, or base survival instinct, I am not worried about the potential heart defect. That is the red herring in our story, I am certain, and not our path. We will need to go through the inconvenience of getting over to the hospital and getting through the ordeal of another 2 hour ultrasound, but in the end we will be told all is well with Baby A's heart. And that is exactly how that part plays out: a wonderfully warm new pair of technician and doctor spend another two hours silently measuring all kinds of things, the "nothing" hanging so heavily in the room that Bruno actually has to excuse himself to the lavatory for a while. But, two hours later, we are told that, yes, in fact, the first tech just got a lousy angle, and this doctor finds nothing wrong with Baby A's heart.

Ok. Phew. Now back to Baby B.

Before we were bundled off for our second 2 hour ultrasound of the day, we were taken into a room for genetic counseling. We were told that echogenic foci (the bright spots on Baby B's heart), have absolutely no medical repercussions, no impact on anything, only that a certain number of Downs Syndrome babies have them. And so finding this marker on Baby B increases our odds to 1 in 150 that one of the girls has Downs. Except, we are told, really we should ignore that because 5% of "normal" babies have this marker and 7% of Downs babies have it, so really it is a nearly useless marker, the softest of the soft. But they are compelled to report it. But really we should ignore it. But would we now like to consider having an amnio?

Oy.

They advise us to take the weekend off from thinking about it, and to weigh the two worst case scenarios against each other. Worst case scenario 1 being we have an amnio and the amnio either goes wrong or causes a complication which causes us to lose the entire pregnancy. Or, that in finding that one of the girls has Downs and choosing to selectively terminate, we lose the entire pregnancy. Worst case scenario 2 is that at the successful birth of our twin girls, they tell us that one or both of them has Downs, and our lives are altered forever.

We do take the weekend off from thinking about it. Bruno flies up to Vancouver to ski with a friend and I go for a weekend at Spa Morse (Mom and Dad's place). We come back together on Monday to begin to work our way through this statistical nightmare and the crying and wailing and gnashing of teeth begins at the Universe which just won't cut us any slack and make anything easy for us.

After a day or two of picking at the threads of the dilemma, beginning to tease apart the complicated knot of our feelings, we got down to brass tacks on Wed evening and discovered that we were actually very clear about how we felt, and very much on the same page. We both felt that if we chose to do an amnio, and anything at all went wrong with the pregnancy from that point on, we would assume that it was because we had intervened, had needed to know and control things. And we wouldn't survive that. We'd eat ourselves alive with guilt and we don't think we'd recover. Whereas if we got to their birth and discovered one or more daughter had Downs, we'd feel sad and mad and Job-like for a bit, and then we'd make magic. We'd pull together and build a beautiful life for our family. I'd start an Arts Camp for developmentally disabled kids and Bruno would run some sort of camping/hiking/biking retreat for families with DS kids. We actually decided that regardless of whether our girls are born with Downs, we will do these things.

When we laid it out like that, it became clear that there was only one choice for us right now: option 1 had the potential to lead to emotional Armageddon, whereas we could live with and even thrive with option 2. So, we decided, once and for all, to eschew the amnio: to open up our controlling little fists and let go and see what happens next. And I have to say, that decision, and coming to it together as a couple, has given me a lot of peace, and a lot of hope.

I guess when you find yourself in the middle of a two year lemon hailstorm, eventually you find your way to getting out the juicer and making something sweet.