6.8. Thomas

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information about it, see right.

I loved being pregnant. I felt better than I did normally because my migraines stopped. I didn’t feel sick. I could eat what I wanted without worrying about putting on weight because I was putting it on anyway. I could lie around in the sun doing nothing because I wasn’t doing nothing – I was making a baby – and me relaxing was good for the baby.

    I put the charity’s comments out of my mind. What did they know? I was going to be fine. All was fine. Everything was going to be OK.

    We went to Kent for a weekend to tell my parents the good news and for once I seemed to have done something right. My mother fed me up, buying new potatoes especially for me.
    She of course had known, she said, as soon as she saw me, before I even spoke to them, that I was pregnant. That made me feel slightly uncomfortable. What else did she see, I wondered.
 
Because of my age, my GP and the local midwife advised me to have the full battery of tests. Reluctantly, I agreed. I could see that they were a double-edged sword and I wasn’t that keen on conventional medicine anyway, except for emergencies. After all, it had never cured my migraines.
    A blood test showed that my baby had a one in ten chance of being born with Down’s Syndrome and the doctor at the hospital was pretty insistent that I had an amniocentesis.
    ‘You don’t know how disabled your baby will be,' she said. 'There can be all sorts of serious complications with Down’s Syndrome.’
    Amniocentesis was an invasive test that involved sticking a needle into the womb and drawing out a sample of amniotic fluid. It sounded horrible, and dangerous for the baby, and I was reluctant to have it. However, after extensive talks with the delightful hospital midwife Nesta, I agreed.
    The test was every bit as bad as I expected, if not worse, as the needle was long and thick and it went straight through my stomach with only local anaesthetic. It was both psychologically invasive and painful.
    Then we had to wait for the results. It was summertime and I did lots of walking over the hills with Brindle, trying to still my anxious mind.
    One afternoon about ten days after the test, I arrived home to find the local doctor sitting in our garden surrounded by our flapping washing, with Frog busying around outside in his usual practical way looking both angry and worried.
    ‘He wouldn’t tell me anything,’ Frog whispered to me. ‘He said he couldn’t. He had to speak to you directly.’
    The doctor had been there for a couple of hours apparently.
    I appreciated him coming to speak to me in person instead of telephoning, but the result of course was yes. Our baby did have Down’s Syndrome, and now we had to decide what we wanted to do about that. Time was running out as I was by now eighteen weeks into the pregnancy.
    Nobody said anything to me but I sensed that people were divided. Most thought a termination was the right option, but one or two strongly disapproved. I was terrified at the thought of it because at this late stage it would involve an induced labour. The clincher however was that I knew without a doubt that Frog was on the side of termination, even though he didn’t say anything either, and I had a horrible feeling that I risked our marriage if I went ahead and had the baby.
     So a week later, one beautiful sunny day in August, we trekked to the maternity hospital in Exeter and checked into our five-star accommodation - a twin room with en-suite bathroom. I was impressed.
    I was to be given oxytocin pessaries once an hour to start contractions and after the first one I changed into my dressing-gown and wandered the hospital’s beautiful gardens with Frog, feeling very strange. I’d detached myself from the proceedings, knowing they were going be unpleasant.
    When the nurse arrived for the next pessary I asked her how she felt about what she had to do.
    ‘It goes against my beliefs’, she said, ‘but I can see you guys are really upset and I want to help you.’
    I appreciated her honesty.
    My waters broke and then the pain started. I was given a TENS machine to use and when that stopped working they injected me with pethidine, an opiod. Normally they had to be careful with drugs because they would pass to the baby but in my case that didn’t matter. I could have as much pain relief as I wanted. Then the pethidine started make me feel violently sick and they injected me with an anti-nausea drug.

    And so it went on, through the night. My temperature rose and they gave me paracetamol and directed a fan on to me. 
    In the morning the baby still hadn’t arrived so I was taken to another room and a doctor jiggled around inside me until suddenly with a great gush something happened and the doctor cried out in great distress, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
    Then I was wheeled into an operating theatre. I was still detached from everything that was going on, but when I watched them put another needle into my arm I could see that I was shaking.
    The next thing I remember was someone touching me gently and telling me to wake up. I opened my eyes to see a nurse was standing over me.
    ‘We’re just going to wheel you back to your room,’ she said kindly. ‘Will your baby be waiting for you?’
    My mind spun. I hardly knew where I was, let alone what was happening. I raked my brain for the correct answer. At last I found it.
    ‘I . . . I think he’s dead,’ I said.
 
Frog was pacing the room when we arrived back. They slid me into to bed – the wrong one, the one that Frog had been sleeping in - and I lay on my back, drained of everything except relief. Nesta, the midwife who I’d spoken to light years earlier, appeared, took one look at my face and kissed me.
    They brought the baby in, dressed in a bonnet and shawl, and let us hold him. It was a boy and we called him Thomas. Frog cried and cried.

To be continued