Listening to your gut feeling

This morning, I was driving to work, and I was thinking back to the beginning of this pregnancy. January 26th, we got our positive pregnancy test, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I yelled for DJ to look at it, and he saw two lines too! I cried the moment he said it was positive. We were both SO excited.

Then, as time went on, I didn't feel as excited as I thought I should. I had expected to have this overwhelming sense of joy. I expected to be consistently excited to be pregnant. We had waited for that positive test for over a year- where was my excitement? I shrugged it off, thinking my brain was just playing tricks on me.

Then the paranoia kicked in. I was constantly paranoid that something was wrong. I was terrified of miscarriage, or some other terrible news. We had our first ultrasound, and our little peanut was perfect. But still, I couldn't shake the paranoia. Then we had our blood work done for down's syndrome and what not, which all came back negative. I thought maybe that was what I needed to start feelin better. But it wasn't. I still had the paranoia. I had told DJ about it, and we decided I had spent too much time on trying to get pregnant forums, and had read too many other sad stories.

So even though I was telling myself of was all in my head; the doctors said everything was fine, I couldn't shake the nasty feeling I had. May 22 was the day we received Wyatt's HLHS diagnosis. We took Austyn with us to that appoinment, thinking it woul be neat for him to see his baby brother or sister, and to be there the moment we found out if we were having a boy or a girl. But I had a bad feeling about tht too. I remember thinking "what if we get bad news, I dont want Austyn to see my reaction, see me cry,etc." But, again, I ignored the thought. My intuition had been right. Something was wrong, very, very wrong.

That day I finally admitted to my best friend that I had had this paranoia the entire pregnancy. She said that she too had had a bad feeling the entire time. We were both just too afraid of our bad feelings to tell the other about them.

I recently learned of a girl we know who is newly pregnant and had some cramping and things. I immediately said "if she feels like something is wrong, she needs to listen to that gut feeling". In our case, even if we had gone to the doctor earlier than 20 weeks and demanded more testing, our situation would be the same. HLHS isn't the kind of thing you can "fix" if you catch it early. There was nothing we could do then or now to change the outcome. But still, I wish I had listened to that gut feeling rather than shaking it off for 20 weeks.

Hindsight is always 20/20 isn't it?