at a time.
When the geneticist told us which genetic abnormalities they were going to test for, I sat in the doctor’s office and I promised myself that I wouldn’t look up any of the diseases on the internet until the test came back positive for a particular syndrome. Because what’s the use of suffering in advance? But I’m very good at suffering in advance. I love to think about what might happen and then get all stressed about it – on a small scale, it might be worrying about hosting a dinner party for friends and on a large scale, well, it could be the various hideous ways we could all suffer and die, one of which might be in a graduate level fluid dynamics class (low Reynold’s number! scaling arguments, people! Argh, falling over!) Well, I think that promise to myself might have lasted a week? Maybe a week and a half? So now I’ve spent some time looking at some of the various syndromes and basically freaking myself out about what the future might hold for Edda. It turns out that some of these syndromes are degenerative, which means as she gets older, it could get worse. Which, of course, is a bummer for everyone involved.
I don’t want to imply that I’m sad or stressed these days, I’m actually pretty happy. Edda’s walking and becoming steadier on her feet, we are trying to keep her hand out of her mouth because we’ve been noticing that she’s been using it less and less to pick things up and we want to keep the functionality in the hand and I think she’s learning (not to speak, but to understand) a couple words (although I’m always the skeptic). She’s not suffering in any way and so I’m also trying hard not to suffer too much as well.
