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Normal results or declining screening

Interview AN01

Interview AN01

Age at Interview: 32
Background: Children: First pregnancy, Occupation: Mother - social researcher, Father - visual effects supervisor, Marital status: Living with partner.

Brief outline:Normal first pregnancy, routine screening experiences. Had to spend time in hospital late in pregnancy for investigation of bleeding.

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Her nuchal scan results were lower risk, but she still did not feel completely reassured.
Print I mean the big thing they talked about was about Down's syndrome screening and she did all the calculations of our risk to start with, my age and those kind of things, which was one in I don't know how many. It was quite high, it was sort of one in hundreds or something. And then she said "and after we've done this test and done these measurements we can now say it's one in many thousand…So what the test has shown us is that it is much less likely that the baby will have Down's syndrome than when you walked through the door." Which is really nice to know, but the caveat to that is, it's always this thing about risk, there are still some cases they don't pick up in that way. So you never go away feeling a hundred percent reassured, which is partly what you go for is to be reassured. And you get a degree of reassurance but not, never a hundred percent reassurance. And they were very keen to stress that they often missed, there were things they could miss at this stage. Did you feel you got enough from them about how to understand the risks that they were presenting you with? I think they did it as well as they can. I think understanding risk is really hard. Did they try different formulations for...? No, no. I mean her basic thing was you came through the door as a 1 in 200, say, and you're leaving 1 in 2000, which to me was quite meaningful. I mean it did mean it was less than when you got out of bed in the morning, if that makes sense, that day. But it still wasn't what I would call a hundred percent reassuring, and maybe there just isn't such a thing….. Do you feel glad that you've had the screening tests that you've had? Has it been reassuring in the end? I do, because they were okay. I think if they hadn't been okay I'm not sure how I would've dealt with the decisions that you have to make as a consequence, because they don't seem entirely straightforward, and they're all about more risk calculations. So I did find them reassuring, a bit nerve-racking, and they do make you worry. But because they came out okay then it didn't feel so bad.

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