My name is Gaby, my husband and I met in University in Mexico. After being together for 7 years, we got married in 2011. We knew we wanted to have kids but being immigrants in Canada made us wait a while to finally decide to start trying. It didn’t really take long and in January 2017 we found out we were pregnant. We were very surprised but excited and happy at the same time. Not really knowing what to expect, we went to the 12 weeks ultrasound scan, the technician asked me some questions but couldn’t really tell me any results. It was until the day after, I got a call from by OBGYN’s office asking us to come see her as soon as possible. In my heart, I knew something was wrong and didn’t really sleep well that night. We went to see her the next morning and she told us the ultrasound had shown some issues with the baby and asked us to do blood work and to repeat the ultrasound right away. We were also referred to a high risk OBGYN who did some further testing and confirmed the baby had Trisomy 18 or Turner syndrome.
Since we had undergone some DNA testing, we found out she was a girl. They told us that the odds of me getting to the end of the pregnancy, and if so, of her surviving were really low, but we could either choose to wait until her heart stopped beating or to terminate the pregnancy. After the longest and hardest weekend of our lives we decided to terminate the pregnancy. Even though I was feeling fine physically, I was very scared of having to be induced if it came to have to deliver her stillborn. I had a D&E on March 28th at 17 weeks. The months after were really hard, one of my best friends and my sister in-law were pregnant at the time, which made the whole grieving process for us harder. We attended therapy and found some support groups that really helped us through.
We got pregnant again in September 2017, the month of her expected due date. Our rainbow baby was born in June 2018. The pregnancy was really stressful, and I went through some PTSD every time we had an ultrasound or checkup, specially the first four months. I actually don’t think I really felt attached to my son until he was almost born. I always had what happened to us in the back of my mind thinking that something might go wrong. He’s now almost 5 years old and we like to believe that his sister, Emma, sent him to us. We have slowly talked to him about her.
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