Early June of 2015. I was sitting in a cramped examination room holding Karyn’s hand while her doctor fiddled around with some piece of equipment, sliding and pushing it around her belly. We were waiting to hear a heartbeat.
Becoming a father is one of greatest and most challenging things I’d ever done up to that point. I felt like if I accomplished nothing else after our son was born I could die happy knowing I’d helped give the world Dashiell. But even in our earliest talks about having kids it was always plural. So, after Dashiell was out of diapers, and things started to feel “easier” in the parenting department, we decided it was time to add another kiddo. And while we just wanted a healthy baby, we really hoped it would be a girl.
We’d actually been in this office the previous Fall, in these same positions, waiting for this same outcome. Only, that time the machine had stayed silent. (“Non-viable” is the wonderfully clinical word.) So, when a rapid rhythmic sound began to pulse through the machine we both breathed a massive sigh of relief and squeezed each other a little tighter. We had a heartbeat. We could move on to the next level of the game.
There was a day, three years earlier, when Karyn was pregnant with our first child, that she called me at work in tears. She’d gotten a message from the Genetic Counselor, and they wanted to schedule a meeting, something about “might have Down Syndrome.” Karyn was frantic, and I felt helpless on the other end of the line, but as we talked I realized that the Counselor wasn’t diagnosing, she was guessing. “Might” is a pretty big word I reasoned, and if she didn’t flat out say our baby had it, then there was a good chance this was just a precaution.
When we finally did meet with her, she said there was a chance our son might have Down Syndrome because Karyn was over 35, and there were a few indicators in her blood work that also pointed in that direction. I asked her what the odds were and she said it was 50/50. I smiled and made an offhanded comment about how if we were in Vegas we’d be crazy to walk away from a 50/50 bet. Besides, we were going to love our baby no matter way, so we declined any further testing.
At the time I think we were just naive enough to think “it couldn’t happen to us.” Plus, being brand new parents we were still wrapping our heads around bringing a new baby into our lives, we didn’t have room to think about a baby that might be a little different. And seven months later, when Dashiell was born happy, healthy, and with an even number of chromosomes, it confirmed that we were immune to the sort of things that happen to “other parents.” Or so I thought at the time.
Fast forward to 2015 and the Genetic Counselor wanted to meet with us again. Again she’d gotten back some test results and we needed to schedule an appointment right away. Again Karyn was upset, but I reminded her that we’d been down this road before and everything had turned out fine. I joked about how a pregnant woman over 35 is classified as “geriatric” and the hospital just needs to cover its ass in case the coin landed on the other side this time. But it wasn’t going to. We were going to be fine. Things like Down Syndrome didn’t happen to people like us.
What I didn’t know was that in the intervening three years since Dashiell’s birth, our doctor started using a new blood test, the Noninvasive Prenatal Test (NIPT) that is very, very accurate in determining certain chromosomal disorders. So when I reminded the Genetic Counselor that we had a 50% chance of having a typical baby she kindly informed me that they were 99.7% sure that our baby had Down Syndrome. She wasn’t guessing this time, she was certain. And she wanted to know what we wanted do about it.
What we wanted to do about it, because now we had to decide whether or not we wanted a baby with Down Syndrome. Or not. There was a choice to be made and it was ours and ours alone. “One more thing,” she added, “We know the sex too. It’s a girl.”
We were both numb. We put on a brave face, smiled and acted like everything was fine. We said we needed to talk things over. We’d get back to her.
Then we went home and made the biggest mistake of the whole pregnancy: We searched the internet for “Down Syndrome.”
Hold On Let Go 
2 Thoughts