After much delay, here is a picture of the sprite at about 9 weeks, taken this past Monday.
You can actually see its beautiful big ol' head, and the little feet and hands, and a fuzzy blobby umbilical cord. I mean, it looks like an actual tiny creature. Every time I look at it I get stars in my eyes and I instinctively reach for my stomach.
Not that you can really tell from my stomach that anything is happening. I've gained 4 or 5 pounds. But since I was already a bit tubby in the middle anyway, I pretty much just look fat. Yet it makes me feel good to touch my belly every once in a while, to remind myself that in fact it's not just fat. That something miraculous and loved is growing in there. What a wondrous thing.
My anxiety has diminished somewhat, as the end of the first trimester seems not too far around the corner. My new worries have to do with the decisions we have to make about testing. Good god, I can't believe every pregnant woman has to go through this -- and especially us older mamas (I'm 36). Of course, I've read other bloggers' posts about testing, but I don't think I ever really understood how nerve-wracking this part of the process could be.
For one thing, it forces you to start thinking about what you would do if something were wrong. And the last thing any newly pregnant woman wants to consider is what she would do if her baby had a defect of some kind. But too bad, because that's exactly what we have to deal with now, like it or not. I just didn't know we'd have to start considering our options this soon.
As I said in my last post, we're leaning towards having an amnio, but haven't made any firm decisions yet. We're scheduled for a genetic consult next week, so we'll have a better idea of what we're doing after that. At this point, having read the literature my new doc (must come up with a name for her) gave me about testing, it seems to us that the early screening tests are too vague to be of much use. If your results come back negative, there are still some important things the screening tests don't look for. And if it comes back positive, that doesn't necessarily mean anything except that you have to have more tests.
The CVS test seems to carry too high a risk of miscarriage, and my doctor said that it's really only called for when you have a history of birth defects or other inherited problems in the family, which we don't. The advantage, of course, is that this test occurs earlier in the pregnancy, so that ending the pregnancy would be less physically and emotionally traumatic than at a later date. The amnio, as I understand it, carries very little risk of miscarriage above the normal risks for that stage in the pregnancy, it offers pretty definitive diagnostic information, and I have a good friend who recently did an amnio and is very happy she did. The drawback, of course, is that it isn't done until well into the second trimester, so discontinuing the pregnancy would be that much harder. "Harder" being, in this case, a gross understatement.
And that's where things really get sticky. Under what circumstances might we consider ending the pregnancy? This much-longed-for, hard-won, miraculous little pregnancy? My husband and I had our very first talk about this issue, and it didn't go so well. If an amnio were to show that our precious baby had serious defects, and I mean serious, then I might feel as if ending the pregnancy were the humane and ethical thing to do. It's hard to know until you're in the situation, but I can imagine making that decision. But if the amnio showed, for example, that our baby had Down's, would I be able to make the same decision? I just don't think I could. Again, it's hard to know until you're in the middle of it, but I just don't think I'd be able to do it.
My husband, however, would. And that's a problem. Or it could be a problem. He asked me if I wanted to have a child with mental disabilities who would never be able to have a normal life. "Of course I don't want that", I said. I wouldn't choose that future for myself or my child. But if those are the cards that are dealt us, would I really be able to live with myself if I terminated a pregnancy because my child had something like Down's? Something difficult and challenging for the kid, but not debilitating or painful?
Things started to get tense, so we just stopped talking about it. Hopefully, dear stars in heaven, please, we won't have to make this kind of decision. For the time being, for my sanity, I just have to believe that everything will be okay. And if it's not, then we'll confront it then. But you can see that in our situation, we have to have tests of some kind. We have to know what we're dealing with.
So that's where my thinking on testing stands right now. I may feel differently after the consult next week. It's awkward writing about this, especially the possibility of ending a pregnancy that is so dear to us. I know every pregnant woman has had to face these same issues, but this is the first time for me, and it's hard to even have to think about it.
