I was very apprehensive, because I was aware that not only had I had a previous Down's pregnancy but I am much older and I'm now in a sort of medium to high risk category. So I was very apprehensive. I certainly wasn't looking forward to it. I wasn't even looking forward to seeing a picture of my baby, because I didn't want to, I didn't want to get involved until I'd had, if you like, the all clear.
And we've had the discussion about the fact that you had these three risk factors being fed in and the kind of lack of clarity, really, about what all that meant. What did the risk factors come out at this time?
1 in 60.
Which is still quite high.
And I couldn't, I couldn't really understand where that number came from, so I decided that I would have the CVS. Actually, I disagreed with my husband on this one. He was happy not to have it this time. But I just felt I couldn't take a risk with my family, having already made the decision to terminate a baby with Down syndrome, and now being older and having a son already, I just felt that if we had a Down's baby that it wasn't only going to affect us as a couple, that it was going to affect my son. So I was less prepared to take a chance that the 1 in 60 would be OK then my husband was.
Did you talk much about his reasoning at that point? Why had he changed his views? Was it simply that it was three times less risk, or something?
Yes. And also I think it was to do with the statistics, and the fact that people weren't able to explain to us what the numbers meant, that he just felt the numbers were more spurious, and that if you took out the risk factor - that if you asked them to recalculate taking out the fact that I'd already had a Down's pregnancy, that the probability wasn't much less but it was 1 in 150 or something, and I felt that that still wasn't great.
He was happy to live with 1 in 150, and he just didn't accept that, the 1 in 60. But because I could never get to the bottom of where these numbers had come from I wasn't happy to accept the risk. I don't know, it's just this peculiar situation, but it did come down to the numbers in the end. That he was happy to discount them and I wasn't.
So the 150 or so, I mean, given that you'd been told that it was a 1% increase of risk if you had...?
I couldn't figure how we went from 1 in 150 to 1 in 60, because I'd had this Down's pregnancy. And - oh yes, we were factoring in another thing, which was a blood test. So sorry, there were four factors feeding in and I just couldn't, I just couldn't get to the bottom of all these different, different things and what they meant, so I sort of erred on the - I went, I rang ARC, and I asked them what they thought, and they suggested that I went through the process which was which decision could I live with?
So if I took the decision to have the CVS and had a miscarriage, would I find that an easier decision to live with than, “OK, I'm not going to have the CVS and I may have a Down's baby.” Yeah, so I decided that I could live with the risk of miscarriage more easily than I could live with the risk, you know, the possible result that we were going to have a Down's baby. |
