Baby Girl Morris
Diagnosis: Holoprosencephaly/Amniotic Band Syndrome
By Baby Girl's Momma
On November 25, 2010 I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. This dramatically changed my life because I am still in college and wasn’t sure if my
husband and I were ready to have children. Once the first initial shock wore off we were both extremely excited. We ended up waiting around three days before we told
anyone about the pregnancy, because my husband, JJ was scared that people might not approve or they might be mad about it.
Our first doctor’s appointment was on December 1, to confirm that I was pregnant. The doctor took a pregnancy test and confirmed everything then went through
everything with me that I needed to start doing. They also gave me prenatal vitamins and a bunch of papers that they said I needed to read about being pregnant.
After everything during that appointment, I was still excited about being pregnant.
We went home after that day and told everyone about the appointment and how everything went. Most people we told were excited. It took JJ’s parents a few days
to process everything but in the end they were pretty excited about it. My parents went and told everyone they knew; they were happy to have another grandchild.
My grandparents were so over joyed about me being a pregnant and so were my aunts and uncles.
My next doctor’s appointment was on December 22nd but we couldn’t make it because the snow came in and no one could leave their houses. But they
rescheduled me to come in on December 27th so we went to the doctor that day and they did my ultrasound and told me that I was nine weeks along. We got to hear
the baby’s heart beat and see the baby moving around. They talked to me about how the baby was doing and things that I should start to expect. So far I hadn’t felt
the baby move or anything. I had horrible morning and night sickness; well actually I was pretty much sick all day every day. I had never felt that sick in my life I
actually felt like I was about to die I couldn’t keep anything on my stomach.
At my next doctor’s appointment we got some bad news. I was told that there was a possibility that my baby has fluid on its brain. My regular doctor couldn’t tell
me exactly what was going on with the baby because their equipment wasn’t that great so they told me they were going to send me to a high risk doctor. We went to
the high risk doctor two weeks later and they did another ultrasound. The nurse didn’t tell me anything so we had to wait for the doctor to come in. When the doctor
came in he looked at the ultrasound again and went on to explain to me what it looked like was wrong to him.
He told my husband and I that it looked to him like our baby had a very rare disease called Holoprosencephaly, which is where only half of the baby’s brain forms.
He also told us that there is no cure for this and that there it was nothing that I did wrong during the pregnancy it just sometimes happens they didn’t know what
causes it. He said there was a chance that he was wrong about it, but it’s not a very high chance, so we had to have more tests done. When he told me this, I cried
all day after I found out. It broke my heart because I was attached to this child already. We went on February 8, 2011 to have the last test done and got the results
back.
The doctor told us that my baby would be bed ridden its whole life and probably wouldn’t survive very long. They also told us that we had the choice to terminate
the pregnancy. We went back to the doctor and they told us there was no hope for our baby. So on February 16, 2011 they induced my labor and I ended up having
my baby girl on February 17, 2011. They told us after the autopsy that my precious baby girl had amniotic band syndrome. I am still trying to recover from this and
I’m not going to try again for a couple of years, but the doctors told me and my husband that we shouldn’t have a problem having another child.
Thank you everyone for listening to my story.