Holly:
Holly is a polymer chemist that quit her day job in a research lab to become a mom. To keep herself busy she coaches running and swimming part time, and volunteer teaches at risk kids science in after school programs.
Chris:
Chris is an Oracle database administrator working in the automotive industry.
We have been together since 1996 and were married in 2002. We tried getting pregnant for over a year before seeking the help of reproductive endocrinologist. Luckily for us, we found we could get pregnant with the help of just clomid, the most basic and least-scary fertility drug. But that's where things got complicated. Over the span of 18 months we had 3 devastating back-to-back miscarriages. We decided to take a 6-month break to de-stress from the previous two and a half years of disappointment.
After the break, we decided to give it another try. To our amazement, we got past the 9-week mark, a milestone we'd never reached before. At the 13-week First Screen test, we were shocked when the bloodwork came back as indicating a 1 in 5 chance of Down's syndrome. This wasn't the baby we had expected, but we would be just has happy with her regardless of how many chromosomes she had. We decided not to have the amniocentesis because it wasn't worth the 1-in-400-ish chance of miscarriage to find out something that didn't matter to us and that wouldn't affect her prenatal care.
Then at 20 weeks, there was quite a surprise at our level II ultrasound / anatomy scan. She didn't carry any of the soft markers for Down's syndrome, but she had a Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia. We had never even heard of that. But basically the doctor said that her chances of survival were roughly 50/50 or less and that we should see a specialist. An amniocentesis confirmed that she does not have Down's or any other chromosomal abnormalities, meaning we could be as aggressive with her treatment as we wanted. And this is where our battle with CDH started.
Ruby:
Ruby was born April 10th, 2009 at 4:31pm.