The body that knows before words are spoken
There are some feelings in motherhood that only you can feel.
They are not easily described.
They cannot be explained by logic.
One such feeling was what I experienced just before the nuchal translucency scan, in the first trimester of my second pregnancy.
It was something imperceptible.
Something I couldn't name, but it was there.
The "something is going wrong" before it's spoken
Quite some time earlier, while I was pregnant, I remember complaining constantly.
Not just about the usual pregnancy symptoms.
It was something else.
I often felt as if I had a hole in my stomach.
A strange, inexplicable feeling.
I wasn't exactly in pain, but something inside me was empty, as if something was missing.
I felt it coming and going.
And every time I ignored it, trying to attribute it to fatigue, stress, to the pregnancy itself.
Αυτό το αίσθημα της ανησυχίας το είχα περιγράψει και στην αρχή αυτής της διαδρομής μου, στο "When the Miracle Hurts",
before I even knew how deep a diagnosis could go.
The scan that changes everything
When the time for the scan arrived, everything happened very fast.
And at the same time, time froze.
The diagnosis came almost immediately:
left diaphragmatic hernia.
I asked the doctor what exactly this meant.
He explained it to me in simple words, as humanely as he could.
He told me that the baby is like having a hole in its stomach.
At that moment I froze.
And I got goosebumps.
Because that is exactly what I had been feeling for so long.
When you realize how much "one" you are
Then I realized how much my baby and I were one.
How deeply connected we were, before I even realized it.
It is overwhelming to feel what is happening to your child
before you are even told in words.
If I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't have believed it.
And yet, I lived it.
I knew that whatever a mother feels passes on to the baby.
What I didn't know is that sometimes the opposite happens too.
And then began a journey full of difficult decisions, anxiety, but also unexpected humanity, an experience I shared later in my story,
to "The miracle of people behind healthcare system"..
The nature of motherhood
What I experienced was magical.
Chilling.
And deeply human.
How strong our nature is.
And how inexplicably strong the nature of motherhood is.
At that moment, I understood that a diagnosis doesn't always start with words.
Sometimes it starts with the body.
A power that cannot be explained.
Only experienced.