The Next 5 Days

If you remember from my last post I said we had a 5 day wait to get any "definitive" diagnosis. I was told "there is evidence of" "it appears as" "there are signs of" but no "Your baby has XYZ". Those 5 days were quite possibly the longest most agonizing days I have ever experienced. It was like boarding that plane [read the poem Welcome to Holland if you don't get the reference] and waiting to take off not knowing if the engine would hold up. So what does one do when they have 5 days to wait?
The answer I am going to tell is the answer that almost every parent with a child of Spina Bifida will tell you NOT to do...Google. I googled like a mad woman. Honestly when I heard Spina bifida I really didn't even know what that meant. Sure I had heard of it on maybe a slide on neural tube defects back in dental school, but lets be honest I didn't really know anything about it other than that. When I said I googled, I mean I googled the poop out of that "possible" diagnosis. (If any of my SB moms are reading this I hope you appreciate this little pun) Again being honest I am not sure if it helped or hindered my thoughts on the diagnosis. Yes I got educated about what SB was and the possible complications and possible problems we were going to face, but I also got a lot more scared by reading all these worst case scenarios and grim prognosis. Knowing what I know now about SB is that it's near IMPOSSIBLE to say anything definitively about what aspects of your child's life will be affected. It truly is a "snowflake" condition and no two cases are a like. What I will also say is that I know no matter what I write here or say to an expecting mom they will hit the internet hard after hearing this diagnosis; I mean it's human nature to want to know and that's just the day in age we live in that the internet will be the go to for that information.
Honestly looking back now (almost 1.5 years later) I can barely remember those 5 days. I was so consumed with fear, emotion and sadness that it was almost like an out of body experience. You want to know what was even harder than coming to terms with that my baby was going to have some sort of birth defect (no matter how small or severe) the thing that was the hardest for me was trying to come to terms with the fact of having to say it out loud not just with my husband but to my family and eventually friends. I just remember crying or tearing up every time I spoke the words out loud. It had turned this thing [pregnancy] that was so fun and exciting into something that I just cried over...a lot. I felt guilty that I wasn't enjoying this pregnancy like I had my first. Don't worry this would eventually change and I would learn to accept the fact, but that's jumping ahead many, many weeks. Those 5 days were hard, but what I can say looking back is that I survived. I learned, I grew and I survived. For any mom that may read this just know you will survive it too! It may not seem like it because honestly I didn't know how I would survive it all, but you will and you will be much stronger because you did.