So...I am baby obsessed. I only recently received the diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Hypermobility type. I'll cover more what EDS is in another blog post soon.
I keep having these dreams of being pregnant and finding out my baby has severe EDS. I know that there are risks to me if get pregnant because of having EDS and I know that my child will have a 50% chance of getting EDS from my genes. I've been tweeting about it (of course!) and here are some I took screen shots from for this blog post.
Someone recently told me that everyone who has a baby takes a gamble on whether they will be having a healthy baby or not. What if the gamble was more like Russian Roulette? Would that be what it would be if I gave birth? Right now I don't think too much of the complications that may affect me. To borrow a phrase my mother used to say, but in all honesty, don't I need to take that into consideration as well? We have a friend who stayed on her seizure medicine while she was pregnant and her son was born with severe birth defects. He's four now and wasn't expected to live that long. If I went off all of my medicine, how many seizures would I have? Would only the tonic clonic seizures hurt the baby? Or would the simple and partial seizures hurt him, too, because my body is stressed?
Of course, we also come back to the beginning of the topic on babies...EDS. I've read of complications from EDS and I've read of women who had few complications. For instance, in this survey online 47% of the respondents had EDS related pregnancy complications.
For now I have to wait. I need to graduate with my Masters first before I can even think about actually having babies. I have doubts about ever being about to work, especially as many of my multiple conditions can worsen with age or cause other conditions that worsen with age. For now I am baby free, and will stay longing for our own child. I don't know how things will or won't work out. I can only hope that someday My Love and I will have our own children, that they will be healthy, and that we will be the best parents we possibly can be.