Mildly Feral

Just like every Disney Villian, every feral mama has her origin story — heres a snippit of mine.

Almost two years ago, my husband and I walked into my 20 week anatomy scan excited to see our growing baby — we were keeping the gender a suprise until birth but still spent the entire trip making guesses about who they would resemble.  During my scan we were told they could only find one kidney, and that they could not get a clear image of the babies heart. We left that appointment with a referral to Boston Childrens, and two weeks later were scheduled for: a fetal MRI, an indepth ultrasound, a fetal echocardiogram, and consultations with numerous specialties. We didn’t tell anyone about the scan or referral, we simply didn’t have it in us to make other people feel better about something that was so unknown and terrifying for us. 

if i could go back in time and tell myself everything would be okay, I don’t know if I would. The following 6 months of my life shaped me, strengthened my marriage, and entirely altered my perspective of motherhood.  

The night before our “day of fun” at BCH, we opted to stay in the city at a hotel down the street— to ease our anxiety about getting there by 6:30 for my 7am ultrasound. We walked to get a nice dinner, and tried to push our anxiety of what was to come out of our minds. 

The appointments day came… and heres the important details

• Baby had two functioning kidneys… one was just in the wrong place, lower and closer to the bladder. apparently in development all organd start lower and very close together, and as the baby grows they shift up to where they ‘belong’. Who knew!
• Whatever the concern was about the babys brain development… wasn’t an issue. EXCELLENT!   So you can imagine the look on my face when they said “the brain issue is a non issue”, quite honestly I think I burst into tears hahahaha — Little back story, we didn’t know there was a question about this… good thing cause if there were three issues with three different major organs — I am 95% certain I would have been on some kind of watch list.  
• The heart turned out to be the bigger issue. They could see that the heart wasnt doing exactly what it should… something with the bloodflow — I’m not sure to this day. They suspected it was a Ventrical Septal Defect (VSD) or possibly an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) — but were unsure which because the heart was still on the smaller side and baby wasn’t super cooperative during the scan position wise. 

Great, so we schedule a follow up ultrasound and fetal echo for six weeks later. Turns out we needed two more echo’s after that, each attempt trying to get as much information as possible before birth. But baby gremlin (as we lovingly referred to them) had other ideas, and essentially was always head down spine out, for each scan — making it really difficult to see any internal organs. Cool, this kid wasn’t even born yet and giving me a run for my money. 

From my 20 week scan to delivery, I had 27 different appointments… between regular OB appointment, cardiology, maternal fetal growth scans, and gestational diabetes (because of course I got that). It felt like a fever dream at times. Somehow it was still all good for me to deliver at the local hospital, instead of a Boston hospital. I had a July due date… with our luck we would be fighting rush-hour traffic, during a RedSox home game… this was a scenario written right out of C’s nightmares. 

The plan was that after delivery, the baby would go to the special care nursery to get checked out, and at somepoint during our stay someone from BCH would come and do an echo on the baby so they could get a clear scan. We had an appointment booked for when the baby was about 2 weeks old with our incredible cardiologist – seriously I owe this woman my sanity.