The day I had been excitedly waiting for finally arrived. I was 18 weeks pregnant and getting the ultrasound to find out the gender of our baby. Myself and my family had been not-so-secretly hoping it was a girl, and I had a feeling that it was.

I watched the monitor as the sonographer moved the wand across my belly. I noted that my baby’s heart looked more like a tube and less like a four-chambered heart but I brushed it off because I recalled that at some point that’s basically all a heart is and I thought I was just remembering the point at which it develops incorrectly. After some time noting my baby’s spine, brain, appendages, and other body bits, the sonographer showed me that we were indeed having a little baby girl!! I nearly started crying I was so happy. I couldn’t wait to tell my husband and the rest of our family. Boys tend to run in the family so having a girl was a precious gift (seriously, she has 7 uncles and only 2 aunts and all the cousins are boys).

After a few more captured images, the sonographer finished up by handing me the strip of ultrasound images. At the practice I went to they would schedule your ultrasound and the “follow-up” with your doctor one right after the other with just a ten minute gap between the two. I cleaned myself up from the ultrasound goop which somehow always wound up pooling in my belly button and went back out to the front of the office to wait for my appointment with my OB/GYN.

After a while I was taken back to a room. Several more minutes later my doctor’s assistant came in and told me the doctor was running late because she had needed to go to the hospital for another mom’s emergency and that it had not gone well. She assured me that I was the first person to be seen once my doctor got there but it would be a little while since she would likely need to gather herself and still needed to review my ultrasound images. My doctor is a sweet and extremely competent woman so I felt bad that her morning had started off in such a funk and I prayed that the mother and family she tended to would be alright.

More waiting.

Finally my doctor came in and I noticed she had some more ultrasound images in her hand. My heart sank because this wasn’t normal. I distinctly remembered that this wasn’t standard practice for them from my first pregnancy. My doctor pulled up her rolling stool close to where I was sitting and you could tell she had been crying. She said that my daughter’s heart had not formed properly. She said that there are some malformations of the heart that aren’t a big deal but unfortunately, this was not the case. She began to cry as I did, and she gave me a hug.  She said I would need to go see a perinatologist, a high-risk pregnancy doctor. Normally we would be scheduled weeks out but due to the severity of the complication, she had already personally reached out to the perinatologist and they were working with his schedule to get me seen the very next day.

Everything seemed amplified and murky all at once. The exact lighting in the room, the muffled voices of the room next door, the feel of the seat beneath me, the way my doctor’s hair fell around her face. But I felt like I was underwater, a pressure that was gentle yet crushing all around me. My ears were buzzing with a non-existent white noise. I felt disconnected from my body, as if I couldn’t move and yet I was moving. I was talking and wiping away tears and nodding. I kept thinking about how serious it was. The heart. You need it to live, it drives oxygen and nutrients and hormones and waste and immune responses throughout your body. Blood is a very big deal and not having the pump to all that could have life threatening effects.

I had known that something was wrong with my baby well before this appointment but I couldn’t tell you why. It just felt off. Certainly I knew that each pregnancy is different and this was no exception. I had bad morning sickness, cramping, sharp pains whenever I sneezed, and other symptoms of a normal pregnancy that I hadn’t experienced the first time around but none of those things were cause for concern. I kept trying to shove aside that feeling that something wasn’t quite right here. As I sat there now confronted with the reality that something was indeed very wrong with my baby I couldn’t help but tell my doctor “I had a feeling something wasn’t right but I thought I was being silly” she comforted me with the words “You’re not silly, you’re being a mom”. Despite all we know or think we know about medicine there is still something to be said for a mother’s intuition and my OB/GYN knew that. The best medical professionals understand that they don’t know everything.

She offered to show me more in depth pictures of the ultrasound but I already knew what I had seen. Entire parts of my baby’s heart were simply not there. I told her I didn’t need to see them and I knew she was already running late for her other patients who would have no idea the rough morning she had had and may treat her poorly because of her delayed schedule. After reiterating some information about what would happen next and another hug, my doctor left. They let me stay in the room as long as I wanted. They made sure I knew I wasn’t imposing and that their staff would come to me once they had nailed down the details of this new appointment for me. I called my husband. I told him what was going on and asked if he could come home from work. I cried through the call and cried more after I hung up. I called my sister-in-law and asked her to cancel our plans for later that day and let her know I was going to be a little longer than expected in picking up my son who she was watching. I cried some more. Staff from the office came in to let me know they had set up my appointment for the next day and some other pertinent info. After quite some time I had calmed down enough to finally leave the room and make it out of the office. In my car I cried again. I called my mom. I cried some more.

The rest of the day was spent similarly, telling the rest of our close family the news we had received, crying, and praying. That night I prepared myself to hear the worst possible news that I could imagine because we did not know what lay ahead of us.  I think the only reason I slept at all was because I was so tired from crying.

It was a hard day, there is no way around that, but a few things made it more bearable.  I had a doctor and office staff who were considerate and kind, we had family who were supportive and cried with us, and my husband had a job that knew the importance of family and allowed him to leave when I called and gave extra time off to come with me to doctor appointments. Thank you, to each of you who treated us with such humanity.