First of all, let me say that I probably brought this upon myself. All along I’ve thought and prayed that it would be best to have our most difficult child first. That way, we could devote more attention to him or her, and our other kids would be downhill. Boy, did the Lord ever answer my prayer (at least I think, and hope)! But He answered in a merciful way. Here I thought we could possibly have to deal with a child with an ongoing handicap or a difficult personality. Instead, we had challenges around the pregnancy and birth that should hopefully be a thing of the past here soon.
Although it might sound like it, this is not intended to be a complaint. In fact, I think if anything, it makes me all the more grateful that we have such a sweet and resilient baby, and that I have such an awesome and flexible job, and that the timing worked out with Brad’s school like it did. However, I was thinking the other day about all the challenges we’re going through. Each step along the way has been odds-defying. After all, how many babies have you ever heard of who had intrauterine strokes? Or how many mothers (without ANY risk factors, mind you) do you know who developed complete placenta previa? So, I thought it would be interesting to spell out a few of the weird occurrences, and figure out how likely it is that someone else would be in our same situation.
- Placenta Previa (complete): 5% with risk factors; ???% random chance
- Intrauterine stroke: 0.02%
- Umbilical Hernia: 12.5%
- Raynaud’s Syndrome: 5.8%
- All of the above combined: 0.00000725%, or about one in fourteen million. To quote from Dumb and Dumber, “So you are saying that there IS a chance.”
Jessica,
I read about Raynaud’s Syndrome and wondered who had it. Is that what you had in your hands?
Marilyn