The midwife frowned, leaning closer to the scanner.
“I just have to get my colleague to have a look at this,” she said, patting my arm. She left the room. I felt a chill. These were the words every expectant mother dreaded. The silence seemed filled with the beating of my heart, faster and louder, as panic took hold and escalated. Conor gripped my hand tightly, and we waited without words for the midwife to return.
Her colleague was older and clearly more experienced. They both pored over the screen, faces carefully composed into identical neutral expressions. I stared too. I had enough scans in my previous pregnancies to know they were looking at the heart. There it was, my baby’s heart, beating away on the screen. What could they see that I couldn’t?
Then, it was over. They were helping me from the bed, wiping the gel from my swelling belly, inviting us to sit at the table by the window. We were being invited to sit at That Table and Those Chairs. Only the couple who are about to receive bad news get to sit there. They couldn’t mean us, surely. This was the kind of thing that only happened to other people. Or in the movies.
I looked at the table. It was low, round, brown wood, really quite unremarkable for the importance of its role. The tub chairs were a shade somewhere between blue and grey. They were positioned in front of a large floor to ceiling window, hung with discreet white filmy curtains. The window was obviously open, for the curtains billowed out into the room in the breeze. The room was airy, filled with light, yet at this point all became hazy.
A doctor must have entered the room. I saw a pair of black trousered legs partnered by black shiny shoes below a gleaming white coat. He was talking to us. Through the fog words jumped out at me, ” …foetal hydrops…cystic hygroma…termination…”
What were they saying?
I understood what termination meant. That’s when the enormity of it all hit me. Bemused, I remember thinking, but you can’t get abortions in Ireland. Throughout it all, Conor gripped my hand tightly, my anchor in all this madness. But we couldn’t look at each other.
We were given an appointment to come back next week to meet another doctor, an expert in something or other, who would be able to give us more information, and then we were shown out into the corridor.
A bright and cheery corridor where only an hour earlier, an eternity ago, we had sat in the queue, eagerly anticipating our first contact with our new baby. A long line of happy, excited parents to be, all smiling at each other, strangers with nothing in common, all waiting, united by our common state. Up on the right, just a little ahead, the door to the maternity ward. And where, right on cue, an exhausted but smiling, recently delivered mother was wheeled past, tiny precious bundle held securely in her arms. All the line of happy parents to be melted, sharing her joy.
Only an hour ago. How could so much change in so short a time?
So we began to walk back down that long corridor. Past the long line of happy parents to be. Into the lift. Down to the ground floor. Through reception. Out into the foyer. Across the car park. Out through the hospital gate. Along the main road to where the car was parked. Only I didn’t see any of it, because when we stepped into the corridor, grief seized me and became my whole being. I was aware only of Conor’s arm around my shoulders, as he negotiated our route, and steered me in the direction we had to take.
A week later we returned for the scan with the expert. He could do little but confirm what we already knew. He referred us to a colleague in a special unit in the Rotunda. That was the best and the worst thing he could have done for us, for over the following weeks we were to watch the true nature of our child’s condition unfold.
Ah, Mary and Dr O’Neil of the special maternity unit, how ideally suited they were to dealing with problem pregnancies all day long. They were the ‘ good doc, bad doc ‘ team of the maternity world. Dr O’Neil would tell it like it is, no holds barred; Mary was the softer sidekick, all tea and sympathy. We liked them, we knew where we stood with them, they were our one constant throughout the remainder of the pregnancy.
On that first visit, however, Dr O’Neil told us that, in her experience and knowledge, this baby could not survive past week 26 gestation. That in one hundred percent of cases, such babies died. She was, without being unkind, matter of fact, brisk, blunt, and certain. Later, my research on the internet was to confirm this. Many of the articles published were medical papers, some included such sad pictures of dead foetuses with hygromas like wings at the back of their necks and shoulders, with their little skinny bodies and large heads, they looked like little alien babies, and I wished I had not seen them.
In this hospital, they had a whole room dedicated to prospective parents to mull over the bad news they had been given, rather than just a table and chairs in a quiet corner. Mary showed us in, brought us tea and biscuits, and sent for the counsellor. Conor didn’t want to talk. I was full of questions. The counsellor advised us to think about a funeral. My baby was still alive inside me, and we were talking funerals. I was shocked to find that stillborns are not included on the register of births and deaths. All those babies, ignored by society. Like they never existed at all. As if their tiny little lives, such as they were, were worthless.
So we discussed funerals, and how we might remember our baby, yet all the time I could feel something else growing within me alongside this new, tragic little person.
It was hope.
It wasn’t a religious thing. I don’t know where it came from, for we had not been led to believe there could be any other outcome for this baby. But I could feel it, and in my mind’s eye, I could see it, a bright shining thread of light, so strong, yet so delicate it could easily be damaged by a breath, or a word. It wound its way through every fibre of my being, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair. And whilst I could not at this point put conscious expression to it, it was to prove a quiet, unassuming and faithful companion.
So we sat and talked funerals, knowing and believing in all we had been told, and yet experiencing at the same time, this extraordinary feeling that neither of us could quite shake off, no matter how we tried to ignore it, or bury it beneath fact.
As for termination, it wasn’t an option. While our baby was alive, so long as it wasn’t suffering, we decided to let nature take its course. For me, every morning when I awoke and realised that my baby was still with me, was a gift. My body, wrapped around this baby, was being granted another day of embrace.
Week 26 gestation came and went. And then, inevitably, the day came where I felt no more movements. Of course, we knew this would happen. Expected it. Couldn’t believe it.
We went to the nearest hospital, where the midwife put us in a cubicle next to a woman who was clearly in the first stages of labour, with her excited family all around her. Conor and I sat in sad silence, listening to this woman laughing and crying through her contractions, encouraged by her family.
Still no doctor came.
Two hours later, we had still not been seen. I was almost suicidal with despair. All I wanted was for someone to listen for a heartbeat. Any midwife could have done that. Finally, some very strong words from Conor persuaded someone to do just that, and JOY! There was still a heartbeat, our baby was alive! We collected our things, and left.
Meanwhile, blood tests showed me to be anaemic, so I started a course of iron supplements. Nothing unusual about that. Five days later, I began to feel more energetic. Five days after that, my baby was turning cartwheels and summersaults inside me, and never stopped until B – day.
I had now entered the third trimester. I was looking and feeling quite large and ungainly. We were attending another of our regular scans.
Dr O’Neil was staring at the screen intently. “The hydrops appears to be resolving,” she announced finally. She continued to take further readings and measurements, while we waited, hardly able to breathe, our eyes burning holes in the screen, trying to make sense of what we could see, looking for obvious evidence.
It was unheard of. Foetal hydrops had been known to resolve during first or second trimester, but never in the third. How could this be? We were warned not to get our hopes up, but the subsequent weeks all showed consistent improvement, and my slender ray of light magnified into a glorious dancing cord of raw energy throwing bright lassoes around every straw I dared to clutch at.
Continued weekly scans revealed a shrinking hygroma, and hydrops slowly draining away. There were still no indications of any known genetic disorder, and an amniocentesis disclosed only that our baby was the daughter we craved.
We named her Carys Morgan, the former meaning ‘to love’, the latter meaning ‘sea – bright’. Never was a child more aptly named; later, we would find that she had so much love to give. Her eyes were the palest silvery blue, a shade I have only ever seen in the Skerries sea on a calm morning. The same sea beside our home, where we had planned to scatter her ashes.
Carys was born on 22nd December 2005. She had a natural birth, three weeks early, with a team of two paediatricians, two midwives and several nurses standing by. She weighed 7lb 10oz, had a very healthy APGAR, and cried lustily. I held her for a few moments before she was whisked off to the special care unit. She looked so normal, a pretty newborn, with a thick mop of black curling hair, a perfectly round nose, a tiny pointed chin and smooth golden skin.
For two days, she looked like any other newborn baby in the hospital. Then the haemangioma began to grow.
