A race against the clock

I just wanted to mention here that I really began to feel the urgency in all these tests. Termination was never even an option in my mind, even though it had been brought up to me by every doctor I've seen to this point.

(I never said the word abortion either. I still can't.)

You can legally terminate a pregnancy in Pennsylvania up to 23 weeks pregnant. The window of decision was getting smaller and smaller.

I began to research Spina Bifida, just as I did with Down Syndrome. Is this manageable? What is the quality of life? It all varies as much as mild issues with feet and walking, to full on paralyzed. Since there are different degrees of SB, and it looked like we had the most extreme case, things weren't looking great.

I stayed my optimistic self, even though I know Matt was pretty understandably discouraged by the whole thing. I thought I could just go and had the in utero surgery (risks to mom and baby, but what doesn't have risks at this point??) and things might not ever be perfect, but I still slightly felt in control of the situation. I still had options. I thought that we would get evaluated, they would hopefully disagree with all the previous findings, and we would get our healthy baby girl!

Maybe I was just delirious at this point. I wonder how high my blood pressure was! I can only imagine.

I remember a few nights on occasion during this time where I could feel my blood pumping out of my body. I forced myself to take walks, just to do something. I even had the tiniest bit of wine. I could not relax.