So it’s been just about a year since my last post. Wow – I suck at this blogging thing! I’ll spare you all the (several) lame excuses I spent the last few minutes coming up with and get right to it.
I pushed the most recent events out of my head and decided that the rest of my pregnancy would be focused on learning as much as I could about spina bifida so I could be prepared for whatever challenges Carter would face when he arrived. Everything I read kept repeating itself over and over: SB is a disability with a wide range of potential issues and an even wider range of severity which varied from case to case. This was probably the hardest part for me at the time – not knowing exactly what to expect so I could plan accordingly. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Having Carter has enabled me to (somewhat) let go of my incessant need to make plans and just take life as it comes. That sounds like such a cliché, but this is a notion I’ve held on to for a few years now and sometimes it’s the only way I find myself able to cope when things get crazy.
I want to take a minute now to briefly touch on something I promised myself I wouldn’t post about when I started this blog – my relationship with B. The purpose of this blog is not only to share my experience, but to give all of the moms out there a real story about life after a prenatal diagnosis. And that includes how the diagnosis affected my relationship.
Relationships are tested whenever you have a child together, diagnosis or not. Becoming a parent is tough. Period. But when you find out that your unborn child faces a lifetime of challenges, it’s a completely life-changing, devastating experience that does take a toll on your relationship with your significant other. It goes one way or the other – either you become closer as a couple and come out stronger than ever at the other side, or you end up not being the team you thought you were and you go your separate ways. For us, it was the latter.
Please, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we broke up because of Carter’s disability. I can’t stress that enough. Somewhere in my hours upon hours of reading, I came across some statistics on the correlation between divorce and disabilities, and read about a few women who swear that their unborn child’s diagnosis ruined their marriage. I don’t think that’s true, at least, not in the long-run. Reflecting back on our relationship, I know for certain that we would have never worked out. This news was more like a catalyst towards our inevitable demise, which I’m actually pretty thankful for from where I’m sitting now. Life will always throw challenges your way, some more difficult to overcome than others. If your relationship doesn’t survive those challenges, I’m a firm believer that you’re not with the right person anyway.
The next few months were a blur of school and appointments. I obsessed about the lesion level on Carter’s spine and the size of the ventricles in his brain. His ventricles were slightly enlarged and becoming more so with every check up, which meant that the possibility of him needing a shunt to drain the excess fluid in his brain was becoming more likely. For those who don’t know, a shunt is basically a valve with a tube coming out of it that diverts the excess fluid to another part of his body. Amazing.
Two months before our lease was up, our landlord let us know that they would be selling the condo we were currently renting. The end of our lease just happened to coincide with the month I was due, which was in April. So, I thought to myself, just to recap, I’ll be having a baby and finishing my degree and moving to another place all within the span of a month. Awesome. At that point, B and I were still together so we decided the best course of action would be to move back to my home town and stay with my parents over the summer so B could work and I could stay home with Carter. The perfect plan. Almost.