The 3 days spent waiting for the results seemed like a bad dream. I thought back to all of the signs that something was wrong. I knew that this pregnancy felt different. I was very sick (not unusual for my pregnancies) but for much longer. I was also still so exhausted. That is normal in the first trimester, but I was supposed to be in my glorious second trimester where I had my energy back and was feeling good. I have not been able to breathe well and I get out of breath at the slightest exertion. That is fairly normal later in my pregnancies when I get much bigger, but at this point I had only gained 4 pounds - another "not normal" for me. As soon as the really bad nausea subsided a little, the heartburn/indigestion/reflux started and has been running rampant ever since. ANYTHING flairs it up - even water! I started taking Zantac 150, but it still did not do the trick. My OB said that I could take 2 of those a day and to take them consistently. Even that does not cure it - maybe it is something else? And lastly (and most alarming to me) - I have not been feeling the baby move like I knew I should. By this point in my other two pregnancies I could feel the baby move and move often. This one is very sporadic - if at all. When I mentioned it to the OB at my 18 week check-up, she mentioned that it could just be the placement of the placenta and didn't explore my concerns further, even though I mentioned that I felt like something could be wrong.
I am sure that doctors get paranoid patients all of the time. I am far from paranoid or dramatic, but I had been feeling like there was something off for a while. I even told my Mom and Sister the previous month that I felt like something was very different - wrong even. But I tried to shake the feeling and did not even mention it to Stuart because I did not want to worry him unnecessarily. Looking back, I think that my intuition was God's way of starting to prepare me for what lay ahead.
After the sonogram, I didn't want to talk to anybody. I still wasn't even clear on a lot of things at that point because the appointment was a blur. We had several family members and close friends waiting on news and also waiting to find out gender. My wonderful husband made all of those calls and explained what we knew. I will never forget how amazing he was through this. He was strong during the sono and after so that I could be a wreck. He went through the hard part of informing our loved ones about what was going on. And he spent the next 3 days letting me curl up in bed in misery, took care of the kids, and explained things to me as many times as I needed him to.
During that period of waiting for the results I did a lot of research on Tri 18. I learned that the disorder was "incompatible with life" 95% of the time. Any babies that made it to full term were born stillborn - if they made it that long. There were a handful of cases where the child lived, but always with severe problems and rarely past childhood. If this is what we were dealing with, I knew that there were lots of tough decisions ahead and we prepared for the worst.
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