My third pregnancy was somewhat of a surprise, in that we thought our family was complete. And I'd actually made an appointment to go and be sterilised and the week I was going to go and do my counselling appointment for that I discovered I was pregnant, which was something of a shock, and not entirely welcome.
But very, very quickly we adjusted to that, and we were really excited. And we told the children and told the family, which was pretty daft, because it was very early days. And I told the course, because I'd just started training for ministry at that point.
And then I lost it. I mean quite early on in the pregnancy. And I was completely devastated. I mean, it was really bizarre when I think about it, you know, because we're talking sort of about eleven weeks here. And I was just completely knocked sideways.
It was handled really well by the hospital. I mean, I do have to say that. The nurse doing the scan - I mean we knew something was wrong because there'd been a certain amount of bleeding and I'd gone in and they did a scan. And, you know, very quickly we realised that there was actually nothing left.
Having lost that child and been so upset by it, you know, it really made us reassess where we were, and we decided actually we did want more children. So I have to say the four children we have are all planned.
So we then went ahead and I became pregnant again. But we felt very, very differently about it now, partly I think because by this stage I had got some friends who'd got, who'd either had problems, you know, significant problems in pregnancy, or we had one friend who actually had a child who'd got a disability and they'd been working with it.
And also issues about, they'd had to sort of think about what to do and how to do it. I think probably also training for ministry I was thinking a lot more about issues, and I'd come to the conclusion, partly because of how upset I'd been about losing the baby, that I couldn't face a termination, really, whatever happened.
And so rightly or wrongly, we decided that if we were going to have a problem we didn't want to find out beforehand, we'd face it when it came. Having said that, with both the other two children we did have the anomaly scan. And that was primarily because the advice I had from my GP - and with the next child - my GP was very supportive about this decision, very helpful and, and she was quite happy to live with it.
And she said, she was encouraging me to have the anomaly scan, because she said if that showed up any sort of physical problems, sometimes it was helpful to know beforehand, and then either things could be done in utero or they could be done immediately at birth. And there was less trauma for the, the child. So it was that sort of thing that we were thinking about. |
