Part 1

The big day is here! I am at 20 weeks of pregnancy, and I am really excited today because I will have my ultrasound and will find out if we are going to have a charming boy or beautiful girl! I have planned a MEMORABLE day!

My birthday is next Saturday, and we will discover the baby’s sex when cutting the cake. The inside of the cake will be pink for a girl or blue for a boy. Only two more days and I don’t know what I will do to pass the time as I am soooo excited! It will be a surprise for the whole family, including my spouse and me.

My plan is perfect:

•    We have to tell the technician that the baby’s sex has to be a secret
•    Ask the doctor to write the baby’s sex and seal it in an envelope
•    On leaving the hospital, we will give the envelope to my friend M,         who will send a text message to her friend S who will bake the               famous cake

Ding! “Zoé, room 4!”

The butterflies just all started to flutter! I walk towards the exam room, repeating to my spouse that we can’t forget to tell the technician to keep it a secret! The woman seems nice. I tell her about my plan, she finds it funny. I settle in, and the ultrasound starts…

“You see that little bubble? That’s the stomach. Here is the femur. We measure the skull…Now, if you don’t want to know the sex, close your eyes!”

I close my eyes. I don’t know why, but I shut them very tight to resist the temptation of taking a peek…just a little one…

The woman leaves the room to give the results to the doctor.

I ask my spouse if he cheated. Nope! Me neither! I am surprised I didn’t! I am so excited to find out what the big surprise will be!

The doctor comes in. I tell him that we don’t want to know the baby’s sex. He seems serious. It kind of put a damper on our happiness. She continued with her exam.

“Your baby is perfectly healthy, but you have placenta previa. Hmm…It is full, and there is no chance it shifts. You will have a caesarean for certain. Who is monitoring your pregnancy?”

“The family doctor group at the J-C Clinic.”

“No, that won’t work. You will need to be monitored for a risky pregnancy. No sexual relations for the next couple of weeks. If there is ever even a tiny bit of bleeding, go to the maternity ward. We will do another ultrasound in a couple of weeks to monitor the situation.”

She leaves.

Umm…a what? Placenta previa? What’s that? Is it serious? Naively, we wait for her to come back to give us more information. A technician comes in. Our exam is over, and we have to leave.

My spouse and I are in shock! A lot of unexplained things happened at the same time. We left the hospital abashed. In the car, I searched on Google for placenta previa, and it wasn’t reassuring: risk of hemorrhage, fetal distress, premature birth…and death.

Great, I am going to die. I FREAK! I shouldn’t have looked up placenta previa. I called my family doctor. Shoot! She’s not available. I FREAK even more!   

A few hours later, my family doctor called me back. I share my anxiety with her, and she tried to reassure me as best as possible.

“Everything will be fine. Many mothers make it to term. You just have to be vigilant. If you have bleeding, go to the hospital immediately for an examination. You may be bedridden, but the worse that can happen is that you will have an emergency caesarean. Medicine has changed, it’s 2016. In the past, women died from hemorrhages, but not today. Everything will be fine.”

Everything will be fine…be fine…be fine…If I keep repeating it, it will be fine, right?

PS – It’s a boy!

(continue reading the next article)

Zoé

The opinions in this article are the author’s alone.