All The Gory Details - part one

I can't sleep. It's 5am and my last night in the hospital, my last night to easily pawn off my kids on someone else and get some sleep, and I can not sleep. Maybe writing my delivery story will put me to sleep - it will probably put all of you to sleep! Ha!

I'm going to start at the very beginning, nine months ago, because there are some things that happened early on that I think may help people who may go through similar situations... and things that Cate should know about her life (because that's who I'm really writing this for, I mean really - did you think it was for you? Get real!). I haven't wanted to talk too much about this stuff until I knew for sure that we were getting a healthy baby out of this deal, which we have, so here goes....

We started trying to conceive in August of last year, and just like with Maggie we were successful our very first month. We're frighteningly fertile I guess. Our excitement was short-lived however because right around the same time we figured out I was pregnant, we also figured out that I was having a miscarriage. It wasn't painful, it was very early, but it was heart breaking. We were realistic about it, understood that it happens to lots of people, and because it was so early in the pregnancy it was chemical - nothing we could have done, but when you want that baby it still feels like a loss. We didn't want to wait to try again, so as soon as we could we did - and now we have Cate. But we weren't out of the woods just yet.

At my first doctors appointment confirming the pregnancy I learned that my progesterone levels were very, very low and if I didn't take something to supplement them for the next six weeks I would likely loose this pregnancy as well. So yay me, I get to use progesterone suppositories and Jason gets benched for six weeks (if you know what I'm saying). Apparently those suppositories can make your partners thingy grow eyeballs or something. But six weeks was a drop in the hat, nine long months of wait-and-see had begun.

After that pleasant beginning we had a series of minor heart attacks along the way. It seemed that I could not get any kind of lab test without there being some question raised, some "uh oh...it's probably nothing". The next big one came when I had my triple screen - a blood test used to help determine the baby's risk of being born with certain birth defects. The test that looks for possible Downs Syndrome came back positive. And we were positively scared shitless.

So here's how it works, if you get a positive on this blood test, it doesn't mean your baby has DS, it just means there is a possibility she has DS. This result is compared to the age of the pregnancy, and the age of the mother. The older the mom is the higher the risk. So you can do a couple different things to find out more. You can skip ahead and go right to an amniocentesis - which carries it's own risks - or you can have a level two ultrasound to take some measurements and check out the baby's heart, looking for other indicators. This is what we did. Once you have the results of the ultrasound, the doctors break out the calculator and give you a number, or a percentage, illustrating the likelihood that your baby may actually have DS. So if you're less likely to have DS than you are to have a miscarriage due to complications from an amnio, you might want to skip the amnio and pray that everything really will be normal, which is what we did. At the end of this process we knew that we had a less than one percent chance that baby had DS, and although we now had to wait through more than half of our pregnancy to find out definitively, we decided we could live with those odds. Cate does not have Downs Syndrome, by the way.

I want to stop here for a second and tell you all that I am 32 years old. I don't smoke and I don't do drugs. Do you know what the biggest contributing factor to all our "uh-oh" moments throughout this pregnancy has been? My age. At 32, my eggs are already growing long, white ear hair and telling stories about the "good old days". I think it's great that women of my generation can pretty much do it all, whatever "it" is, and we can fit work, play and family into a long and happy life. But I think there is one huge misconception being propagated out there - the misconception that YES, you can do it all, and YES it will be easy. The reality is, of course you can have kids well into your thirties and forties, but NO it is not going to be easy. I believe that because of the personal and emotional nature of the conversation, women that are experiencing difficulties have a hard time showing that to friends and family -- compound that with the fact that for many women in their twenties a baby is so not on the radar yet that it's easy to hit the snooze button on that annoying biological clock -- now you have a generation of women like me, women that feel like someone should have warned us at 22, just a heads up, "Hey, you can do whatever you want, but your chances of having a healthy pregnancy after age 35 are like one in a gazillion." And then someone should slap that 22 year old really hard to help the info sink in. Even at 32, I saw issues arise during this pregnancy that at age 29 would not have been there, and I know many women sitting on the other side of 35 heartbroken that their dream of becoming a mother now involves complications or fertility specialists.

End of part one - off to take a shower and kiss my kid a hundred times...