Yesterday was the long awaited visit with my MFM.
I’ll save you the suspense, the most positive words out of his mouth were, “Well, it’s not out of the question.”
Which pretty much sums things up.
He confirmed several things I already knew:
1) If there is a good time to get pregnant again, right now is not it. I already knew this because I’ve seen my labs too, and as someone who’s been diagnosed for close to ten years, I know how to read them. I also already knew my blood pressure isn’t really controlled at the moment.
2) Another pregnancy is probably riskier than the last one given that more time (and damage) has passed, and in that same vein, I’ll just be older. Older may be wiser (maybe) but it’s just not a good thing in pregnancy.
3) My doctors are just guessing too. No one really knows how the next pregnancy will turn out. Nobody but God, I suppose.
On the other hand, things I didn’t know (or perhaps didn’t want to admit):
1) He ballparks the likelihood of what happened to T happening to another baby between 20-40%. In otherwords, there’s a reasonable chance of it happening but not an overwhelming chance. I don’t particularly like those odds, Paul seems to think they’re not that bad. But I think that’s because he’s coming at it with a bit of hindsight, knowing that T is okay. How do we know another baby can make it through that?
2) His money would be on delivering around the same gestational age or earlier. Obviously, it’s the last part of that sentence that I find disturbing. For whatever reason, I thought that not having developed pre-e and placental issues until the later parts of my pregnancy would mean I’d have a better chance of delivering even closer to term in a subsequent pregnancy. Maybe that’s true generally, but clearly my MFM doesn’t think so in my specific case.
3) At some point between being pregnant with T and now, some irreparable damage may have been done to my kidneys. I think he (and my other drs) think it was because of the pregnancy, but personally I think it has more to do with being lackadaisical with my meds, especially while I was breastfeeding and really trying to stop my meds.
It was a long appointment so of course a lot more than this was discussed, but I think the overall tone is what I’d call negative. He gets it. He knows that in a perfect world we’d probably already be trying for #2. But given our specific situation, I think if his job were to simply tell me yes or no, he would have said no. Not now, not ever.
As it is, his job is to inform us of the risks and his opinion but ultimately let us decide. And his opinion was, “Well, it’s not out of the question,” followed by a lot of caveats.
So what have we decided? I can’t speak for Paul but for myself, I’m preparing myself for the reality of T being our one miracle.
I will say that, without T, an appointment like that would have left me a complete mess. With T it is much harder to wallow in self-pity and disappointment (don’t worry though, I’m still definitely managing to do some wallowing) mainly because T is such a freaking miracle. This appointment kind of only reinforced that. I’m trying to focus on that instead of focusing on what we may never have.
I’m trying to be grateful instead of bitter.
Of course, I reserve the right to have my bitter moments in the coming months (especially here).
For now the plan is for me to get healthy. Whether this is in preparation for another pregnancy or simply so I can be a healthy mommy to T doesn’t particularly matter.
I wish so, so much that you did not have to make these decisions. I wish that family decisions could be left up to the family and didn’t have to involve weighing such heavy factors. I know you want more children and I wish it was easier to get to that point. You have every right to be bitter, angry, resentful, whatever. You have T. He is a miracle beyond miracles. He is amazing. But you are still dealing with losses. A loss of control. A loss of the romantic view of pregnancy and family building. A loss of being a healthy young wife, parent, adult. Here for you through all of the ups and downs. I hope you both find peace in whatever decision you make. And I hope you begin to feel better physically soon!