Finding out about spina bifida

For my first post I am going to go back and talk a bit about what we have went through since we found out that our son had spina bifida. We found out at our week 18 ultra sound. Usually this time is filled with a lot of joy. I was expecting another girl (we all ready have two). But it was a boy and I was ecstatic. I love my girls and I would have been just fine with another girl but being a guy there is just something about knowing that you are having a boy to pass on your name. So there was a definite joy in the room when they said that we were having a boy. The whole ultra sound took forever. We had a new nurse and everything was just so weird in the room. We later wondered if they saw the spina bifida so were trying to figure out what was going on.

We got the call later that afternoon saying that something was wrong. We knew something was up when our doctor called that quickly. It was on a Thursday and we didn't expect to hear from him till the next week just to say congratulations and everything was not OK. My wife answered the phone and was talking to him and came back in and said that he had a lemon shaped head and that could mean that he had spina bifida. At this moment so many things go through your mind. Who is to blame? Is it me? I am adopted so I have no idea what kind of health issues I could pass on to my children because I don't have that information. The blame can then try to get passed on to your spouse. What did they do? Did they not take their vitamins? Could that have helped? It is a whirlwind of things that go through your mind in a matter of minutes.

We were referred to a doctor in St. George that dealt with problems with pregnancies because he would know more about what was going on and what they could do to help. When we got there we were hoping that the new nurse had just messed up and taken some horrible images and that was the reason why there was a problem. When we got there though that was not the case. We found out he did in fact have spina bifida and then we talked about the options. There was a surgery that could be done while the baby was still in the womb. This would decrease some of the risks that could happen when he came out. We thought that was something we would want to look into and see if it would work. There was a long process though to find out whether we could qualify.

The University of Utah hospital was an in between for patients who went and got the surgery and then had to come back to Utah. There was only a handful of places in the United States that did this surgery because it was relatively new. One of them was San Francisco and we figured that is where we would go if we qualified because it was the closest one. We did all the tests necessary to find out whether we could do the surgery or not and we were eligible. We were so excited. But then came the problems with the surgery.