Cars, Coins, and >10%

It’s 9:15 AM and Little H and I have already been to a park, grocery store, peed in a parking lot (him, not me), and are now at the mall 45 minutes before the stores open. Ambitious today, aren't we? Well, it's a feat in maneuvering Los Angeles traffic as I await my appointment with a geneticist later this morning.

I’m watching my little boy climb around on those electronic cars that rock back and forth; he pretends to drive the bright hunks of metal and waves at me through the window openings. I smile at his sweet play. How I love my little companion. And I also kind of love that I don't have to put quarters in the cars yet.

The last week has been filled with a pendulum of specialists’ opinions on my pregnancy. The geneticist, today, won’t offer much new to the picture. Mostly, she will go over the possible abnormalities the baby may have. Using estimates from my radiation office on actual amounts of exposure we're dealing with, she will work out an equation of risk. If that estimated risk of abnormality is above 10%, her professional advice will be to seek an abortion, as is the standard in the medical community.

I am appalled that babies with 90% odds at health are preemptively aborted.

I will look calmly into her face and nod, interested in the percentage she will come up with, but knowing Bobby and I will not heed that advice, should it come.

It does not come. In a few days I will receive a letter from her, in which she details her calculated risk to fall in the below 10% range for abnormalities.  We receive this, and all of the recent facts, as promising. Our raging storm is settling into a tranquil awe.

We still don’t share the news yet, and I try to maintain some semblance of a shield between wholehearted elation and expectation. While I long to hold onto the palpable meaning in this peripety, I also want to be able to survive if it is not the reversal of tragedy I hope it to be.

Ultimately, I understand I may lose the baby and that he or she is running a higher risk of deformities. I understand I may be compromising my own health, slightly, with a pregnancy and a delayed start to my adjuvant prescription regime. But as long as we have a growing child, we still have good news.

If this little one makes it, what a beautiful, beautiful miracle at the end of so much pain.