By Kristen Witucki
The sonographer’s job was not to make small talk. I knew that. But I realized how important such chitchat was to me as a blind mother—and therefore how ominous her silence–as I lay there for an hour while she took pictures of my baby. All I could hear was clicking and clicking and more clicking while the weight of mid-pregnancy pressed on my aching lower back.
After her brief initial demonstration of the baby’s heartbeat and her question about whether we wanted to know the gender of our child or not—we did—she had nothing more to say.
James, my partner and the father of my baby, sat in a chair a few feet away, close enough for us to talk if we wanted to but too far away to touch. We didn’t speak—maybe the computer would be kinder to us if we didn’t. Because he is also blind, James could not offer any description to alleviate the silence.
Suddenly the sonographer asked if I had to go to the bathroom. “You have a full bladder, so the baby can’t move for me to see its gender,” she said. I had been trying to be helpful by keeping my urge to pee as silent as possible, since there seemed to be no place during which it was okay to interrupt her endless clicking, but instead, I was holding her up.
I rose on legs which shook from nervousness and relief, and she helped me maneuver to the bathroom and then helped me back to the chair. She put some more cold goop on the mound my belly had become and went back to work.
“It’s a boy!” she sang out suddenly without any preamble. James, who had only daughters and granddaughters said, “What?!”
“Yeah I knew it,” I said matter-of-factly. There would be time and space to worry about his maleness later. For now, I just had to know whether my baby would be okay.
We moved to another room to wait for follow up confirmation from the doctor. I was relieved just to sit up. She entered in a flood of cheer which did nothing to calm me down. “How are you?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said, forgetting to return the pleasantry. “How’s the baby?”
“We’re going to send you to another hospital,” she said, “because there is a small mark on the heart which one study in Europe indicates can have a weak correlation with Down’s Syndrome. The baby is probably fine but we just want to check.” Then as an
afterthought, she added, “Did you find out the gender?”
“Yes,” I said numbly.
“Aha,” she said, “there’s a penis among us.”
And off we went to the hospital's antenatal testing unit. This sonographer was much more forthcoming, talking about what she could see, confirming the gender, filling the void with her soothing voice.
Then a male doctor stormed in. The first thing he asked was if my guide dog, a gentle, floppy-eared male black lab whose leash my partner was holding, would bite him.
“No,” we both answered.
He moved the Doppler around on my belly and tried to nudge my son, who had apparently decided to hide. “You might want to consider terminating the pregnancy,” he said, “given that the baby could have heart complications. Given your life issues. I’m going to get a colleague.” And he walked out.
He brought in a female pediatric cardiologist whose speech seemed particularly gentle and lilting against the other doctors’ brusqueness. Our son was still not in a position to allow them a view of at his heart, and no nudging could get him to cooperate. He needed a nap. “I don’t see anything,” the male doctor said, but he was not talking to us. “And she is young, but with that mark, I just don’t want to rest.”
“Look,” said the cardiologist, pointing to me and the tears which came silently despite all of my effort, reminding the doctor that he was dealing with a person. I needed a nap myself.
“Look,” he said, “all I said was that I needed to get a colleague. I didn’t say anything.”
He told us that the baby was not in a good position to see much, so we could rule out Down’s in one of two ways: an amnio that day or a visit in two weeks to look at
the heart again via ultrasound when the baby was a little bigger.
“And … I know this a Catholic hospital, but …”
“You can still talk to me about the abortion.”
“Would the two weeks affect … the safety of abortion?” I asked.
Although I am politically pro-choice, this was the worst admission for me as a mother. That I, a person with a congenital disability and who had extensive training in the education of students with disabilities, temporarily fell into his trap, the “you can’t be a mother, especially of a baby with a disability, and I have so little faith that this will work that I will brooch the topic of abortion in a Catholic hospital” trap. But I did.
“Physically, you mean?” he asked, and I nodded. “No, it won’t make a difference.”
They left us alone for a minute to make our decision. Fortunately, James was not ruled by hormones. He convinced me to wait two weeks, that an amnio was painful and probably unnecessary. And all through those long nights and days, he kept saying he knew the
baby would be ok. He just knew it.
The two weeks were helpful, even though they were torture. They gave me time to cry, then to pull myself together enough to ask my friends who had experience teaching children with Down’s Syndrome more about the condition. “They’re so sweet, so
happy!” I kept hearing. “And it’s a disability which will still allow them be verbal.”
Verbosity was important to me. For the first couple nights, while I cried, my son stayed respectfully silent, but once I could lie down more happily, he kicked, danced on my bladder. I decided he must really be a very gifted baby, and one of my pregnant friends said, “Yes, bladder-pushing is a sign of obvious brilliance.”
The advice to wait two weeks did not just have a medical benefit. With each passing day, I was falling deeper in love with my baby.
Two weeks later, we returned to the antenatal testing unit. By this time, James was as nervous as I was. He went out to buy breakfast for us before the test and left my breakfast sandwich at the restaurant; he forgot his hat, exposing his bald head for the world to see; and he opened the door of the taxi when it stopped at a red light, before it arrived at the hospital.
We met yet another sonographer who was nice and chatty. She called our baby Lovebug. The doctor came in to look at the baby’s heart.
“Is he moving?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said. “He has his head down on his hands. He’s napping. But we can see what we need to.”
They told us not to try to interpret their silences or their conversations with each other and kept asking if we were comfortable. And at the end, we got our reprieve: our baby did not have any heart issues at all or any physical indications of Down’s. How must it be, I wondered, for parents who don’t get that reprieve? And I realized how little the exposure to one disability prepares us for the possibility of others.
There was still a penis among us, his maleness was still alien to me, but my baby and I had both been in the same place—we had both not been wanted by a doctor—and that drew me closer to him.
Kristen Witucki has been blind since birth. She earned a BA in English and Masters degrees in education and in creative writing. She lives in a small town in New Jersey, USA, with her husband, James, who is also blind; her one-year-old son, Langston; and her Seeing Eye dog, a male black lab named Tad.
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