What would you say to other parents thinking about whether or not to have screening?
Well, I suppose you have to do the same as we did, and weigh up the risks, and what is the worst outcome for you. For us it would be worse if we'd had a Down's baby, so we decided that we'd rather take the risk of amnio than take the risk of not knowing and possibly having a Down's baby. But each person has to weigh up their own worst case scenario, I think, and use that as a guide.
Would you recommend to people that they should think about what their attitude would be if they're told that their baby has something wrong before they get to that point, or do you think it's not something you can anticipate what your reactions will be?
You can anticipate, but you may, you have to be very prepared to change your mind, I think, because you never know how you're going to react in such a situation as that, until it really happens. Hypothetical situations are all very well, but it's, you know, you can never envisage exactly how you're going to react. When that happened to us, I don't know, we'd never had a, neither of us had had a parent die or any other sort of close death in the family like that. We didn't, that was like truly the worst thing that had ever happened to us.
And I didn't have any idea how I was going to cope with such a disaster. You know, we just didn't know how we were going to deal with that and how we were going to react to it. And you can never anticipate, really, how you cope until you're in that situation. And then we were actually amazed at, at how well we did cope. I couldn't believe that we'd actually made it through, and survived such a thing.
When we went back for some follow up appointment X number of weeks later, and we sort of sat in the doctor's office and said, “Well, here we are. We've, you know, we've got this far. We can't believe we've actually done it, and such an awful thing has happened, and we've turned the corner, and you know, we can look forward, sort of thing.” |
