A Transcript Biography Sample

I was due to give birth on 25 February 2024, but I ended up giving birth on 2 February 2024. 

My last trimester was going ok. I mean, I was uncomfortable because the position of the baby was such that he was pressing on my bladder, and so I was just going to the toilet a lot. I guess that's how it is for most women. But otherwise, I wasn't feeling extra tired or anything. It was quite normal. My blood pressure was perfectly fine as well.  

Things took a wild turn at 36 weeks, but until then it was ok.

I went in for a scan at 36 weeks at the HB Center. Firstly, that isn’t a normal thing for hospitals to do. It's just something that this local hospital that I was registered at did. And actually, I registered with them later in my pregnancy because we moved house. The original hospital didn’t offer this scan. 

So at the scan, for one, my blood pressure was very, very high… I don't know why. But it was high enough for them to be worried, which was worrying me, which I don't think helped with the pressure.

Then they said it looked okay, but there was one small thing that they had to check. So that the first scan went on for 45 minutes. Then they said something's not looking right in the baby’s heart so we need to have a special cardiologist come and do a scan. Luckily it was a Monday, so the cardiologists were on the ward. So then the cardiologist came and they did another check for another 45 minutes.

That's when everything went downhill. 

W and I were made to wait in this windowless room and then they came and said that the baby has potentially like three heart defects.

One is the coarctation of the aorta, which is the main blood vessel that pumps blood from the heart to the rest of the body. That was narrower than usual, and there's a duct in that blood vessel that usually, in normal cases when a baby comes out, closes automatically and that's when the heart starts functioning as it's meant to. But in this case, because the blood vessel was already narrow, the duct closing once the baby came out was potentially a dangerous thing.

Then they said the baby had a medium-sized hole in the heart, like somewhere in the middle. And also that they said there might be some problem with a valve.  

We just started crying.Oh, wow. I didn't realize I’d get emotional talking about it.