Who am I?

Well..... I am married to a wonderful husband, Rob, and a mommy to Meredith. Why am I starting this blog? I need to be able to "talk" about it, but not have it be the only thing that comes out of my mouth to others.

This blog will be filled with some very ugly truths. It will be filled with very very bad thoughts that no mother should have. And it will be filled with good moments that we have as a family. If you don't feel like you can stomach without openly judging my thoughts & feelings..... then this is not the blog for you.

I'm pregnant with a baby boy. He's due in July. We've named him Sean Matthew. Our Journey with Sean started a few months ago when I received some iffy blood work results. My blood work showed that my AFP levels were low. My dr informed me that based on my age the risk for down's syndrome was 1:417. Based on my blood work that number was brought to 1:125. What were my chances of being that one? Doesn't that test have a high incidence of false positives? Well..... my chances of being that one was .08%. Those are pretty good odds if you ask me. That test had a huge rate of false positives. Rob & I kept up our hope that we wouldn't be that one. We declined the amnio for many reasons. Chief among them being that we didn't want to risk the miscarriage of a child we were sure was healthy. We instead opted to check for soft markers. The other major reason for declining was because I really didn't care for the genetic counselor. She kept saying I had to do it NOW in order to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy if I wanted to based on the answers even though I had already told her that wasn't an option. And at that time, it wasn't an option in my mind.

I went back over my ultrasound pictures & tried to convince myself that Sean's head wasn't flat. That to me has always gone hand in hand with down's syndrome. Kind of like the persian cat's face. I believed everyone when they said his head was not flat.

I finally has my level 2 ultrasound and because of his position had to go back for a follow up. At the follow up I knew I saw a hole in Sean's heart. I knew there was a problem, but the tech kept saying.... "he's just in a bad position." I declined the fetal echo at that place for various reasons.

My dr advised us to get the fetal echo. We decided to do it at the hospital. He was then diagnosed with tetralogy of fallot. A congenital heart defect. We were crushed. We learned a lot about this condition and Sean will have to have surgery when after he's born. Ideally he'll be able to wait until he's at least 3 months old to have the surgery, but that will depend on whether he can keep his oxygen levels up.

At this point I knew.... I just knew that he had down's, but I was still trying to be hopeful. Last week we had the amnio done to check for chromosomal abnormalities. Ya know to rule them out. Well we were given the devastating news that Sean does in fact have down's syndrome. I was so angry with everyone for giving me hope. So angry with myself for trying to be happy about a pregnancy I was already ambivalent toward. I feel cheated and disappointed.

Rob & I are wrestling with whether we're the best people to raise Sean. We truly love him and we want nothing, but the best for him. We want to make sure he's given every opportunity to reach his full potential. We just don't know that we're the best parents for him. So we're going to gather information about his condition and what we should expect in terms of development. We're also going to learn more about open adoption. It's going to be a long journey while we sort through our feelings, our capabilities, our realistic expectations and how we'll explain to everyone what we're going through.

I'll post more tomorrow. I'm tired from a very long day.