It was, without a doubt, the hardest month of my life. My husband was still traveling for work, and virtually every day was filled with fearful tears that would sit just behind my eyelids, waiting for a trigger. The newborn on the subway or the well-meaning friend asking me how I was feeling would turn on the faucet. Every time family asked me if we had names, I literally wanted to scream. The 12-week mark came and went — the cheesy Facebook announcement we had planned on crafting was in a perpetual holding period. I was always standing on the edge of either immense happiness or unimaginable sadness.
Every day was filled with fearful tears that would sit just behind my eyelids, waiting for a trigger.
I've thought a lot about this, and I wish I'd never blindly agreed to the genetic testing. I wish I'd read more about it. I wish I'd prepared myself for the outcome. But most of all, I wish I'd had the genetic testing done before getting pregnant. That's what my doctor meant when he said we were poster children. We were both perfectly healthy with no serious family conditions — there was never a cause for concern.
Until there was.
The amnio came back three weeks later, when I was 19 weeks pregnant. All was fine. In fact, he wasn't even a carrier — a result I found almost alarming. That 25 percent could have gone either way.
We were back on track, business as usual. But it was hard suddenly having to engage again, be excited again. The first half of my pregnancy was clouded in shadows, so when the sun finally came out, we didn't trust it.
Eventually, the morning sickness subsided and being pregnant became more of a blessing than a daunting sentence. The next two trimesters went by totally uneventfully, and minus the fact that he was 12 days late, he was born a healthy boy — for which we are so, so grateful.
So what will happen if/when we want to have another baby? We have a few options. We can use IVF to "discard" any eggs that carry the gene. Or we could conceive the old-fashioned way and get a CVS (similar to an amnio) at seven weeks, with a greater chance of miscarriage. Or we could get an amnio again at 16 weeks. Either way, I'm happy to have options and the ability to go into our next potential pregnancy eyes wide open.
In the meantime, we are just happy to have our wonderful little Gabe. Short for Gabriel. Meaning "God is my strength."
