Blindsided

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts enough to post about this.   It's been a difficult couple of weeks with a lot of highs and lows and it's hard to put into words how I feel.  It seems to change every couple of minutes.

Two weeks ago I went to my routine doctors appointment and he decided to book me an ultrasound.  There wasn't anything he was concerned about, just that due to him taking vacations and us taking vacations, I wasn't going to be able to get in to see him for another month.  So, just to make sure the baby was doing well, we decided on an ultrasound to make up for all the missed appointments.  I went to the appointment and when the technician said he needed to go talk to the radiologist, I knew something was going on.  By the time I got home there was a message on my phone telling me I needed to come see my OB right away.

As I was driving to my doctors appointment the next morning I remember thinking about the word "blindsided" for some reason.  I was looking back through my life at the time I felt I had truly been blindsided.  I'm not talking about moments where you go, "oh, I didn't expect that".  But times where something hits you completely off guard and alters the course of your life forever.  I thought of when my brothers got cancer as well as losing my brother Donald so suddenly.  I wondered if this was going to be one of those moments.  I wasn't too worried, but perhaps is was the spirit trying to prepare me for what was about to come.

Long story short - the doctor told me there were some problems with the heart.  It was too big.  Okay.  What does that mean?  We were scheduled for a fetal echocardiogram two days later in Calgary.  We soon found out that our baby has a condition call dilated cardiomyopathy.  When the doctor gave us the diagnosis we had no idea what it was.  Cardiomyopathy?  Okay.  How do we fix it?

It wasn't until we got home and sought out knowledge from our good friend google that we realized what we were really dealing with.  A non-curable heart muscle disease.

We don't really know what this means for our baby and for our future.  It's kind of a "we have to wait and see" situation.  We do know that it is not good and that a lot of babies don't survive this disorder.  Many don't even make it to delivery.   We will be having the baby in Calgary, but do not know how long we'll be there.  What we do know is the baby is doing well right now and we are hoping that I will be able to carry it to full term, I'm currently at 34 weeks.  Right now we are having weekly ultrasounds to monitor the baby and it's health.  If it starts to show signs of heart failure it will be delivered immediately.  At this point, there are no signs of failure so we are praying it stays that way.

We are worried and scared of what we don't know.  But we are faithful and trust in the Lord that things will work out as they are supposed to.  Mostly, we are praying for a miracle.