We're Pregnant

We found out we were pregnant on September 21st, 2008. We had only been trying for a little over a month and we were so excited! We had a pretty uneventful first trimester, I was tired and a bit nauseous but overall had a blissful first 20 weeks. When we went in for our "big" ultrasound, we found out we were having a boy! Yeah! We also found out I had a "marginal placenta previa" which just means the placenta is sitting low in the cervix. It can be somewhat serious but it's pretty common in early pregnancy. I think they told me about 1/3 of women have it at this point but 75% of the time it moves upward, so they wanted to check me again in two months, if it hadn't moved up I might have to eventually go on bedrest. Seemed like an awful possibility to contemplate, three months in bed with nothing to do?!? Oh, I sure wish I would have known how very little of a thing that would have been. In the end I was so happy this happened though as it is the only reason that Jonah's condition was found and we could prepare properly for his birth and deliver at Children's Hospital.

Welcome to our CDH Journey

Our son Jonah was born with a Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH). When we were pregnant and first diagnosed, I began searching the Internet for information on this birth defect. I found information scattered across many sites and found it helpful, but I also wanted to hear from people who had been through it. I found several excellent blogs, both from parents of living CDH survivors as well as CHERUB angels. My darling CDH survivor is now six months old, and telling our story on this blog is my attempt to give back to the CDH community. I know it would have been better to have posted throughout the journey, but it was so crazy, I'm going to recreate it here using my paper journal, emails to/from friends, my scrapbook, and my calendar. The dates have been modified so they appear on the day that the events happened. Here we go...