Today, I'm sharing a cartoon that was published on NPR. While our stories are a little different, Lauren didn't find out until she was pregnant that she AND her husband were both carriers while I know in advance, I can't help but relate to every carrier of a genetic disease out there. There are so many stories, so many diseases, but they all share the same core elements: fear, hope, despair, waiting. I feel like being a carrier takes so much from the experience of pregnancy or TTC. You don't get to worry about planning baby's birthday, or whose eyes or laugh baby might have, you're too busy agonizing over whether you can even get pregnant and if you do, will you have to terminate because of a tiny genetic typo? Lauren's typo, the mutation for CF, is 3 missing base pairs, while my Fragile X repeats look like a cat walked over the keyboard while my code was being written. CGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Whoops, but there's no backspace.
Spoiler: Lauren's story has a happy ending, and while I'm not a fan of her "everything works out in the end" message because, honestly, a lot of the time it doesn't work out in the end, I do appreciate the light she's shedding on carriers of genetic diseases. For her future comics, I'd love to see something about TTC with the knowledge that you might have to terminate multiple times or have a child with a serious genetic disease. Or a comic about parents who have lost a child to a horrible genetic disease and are trying to heal and decide how to go on. Or one about those of us whose genetic mutations come with a side of infertility and how just getting pregnant is a constant struggle with fertility drugs and the insurance companies, with testing and waiting, with no guarantee of a healthy baby. Those topics are all a little heavier, less palatable than "it all works out in the end", but like so many things, one step at a time. One ray of light at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment