My Story

For most people the last thing they think about when pregnant is my baby might have a birth defect. I know for me it felt like my whole world was turning up side down. I was going in for my 20 week check up with my obgyn with my husband. I remember as we were sitting there and the nurse was giving me my ultrasound she went silent. In my head I thought "what are the odds anything is wrong? my baby has been health and perfect all this time so there is no way anything is wrong" but still her reaction scared me a little but so i asked her if everything looked normal and all she said was "the doctor will go over your results" i could literally feel the hair raising on the back of my neck. We moved to a different room and waited for the doctor to come. He came in, sat down and told us the bad news. Our baby has a cleft lip. At first I didn't believe it. Not me. This couldn't happen to MY baby. Me and my husband left the room barley speaking. It wasn't till we got into the car that the tears started to flow.
Back tracking a little bit. My dad through out the years had been involved with a organization called operation smile. It was founded by a couple name Bill and Kathy Magee in 1982. Operation smile goes all around the world helping children and adults who were born with a cleft live a happy normal life with the help of surgery. Ever since I was little I knew bout operation smile because of my dads involvement. I would try and raise money for the kids who were waiting for surgery but didn't have the means to pay for it. I had sibling who went on missions (1-2 week trip to a country to help operation smile), I was involved with the operation smile club at my high school, i thought i knew all about cleft lip and palate but to be honest I never really gave it too much thought until I found out we would have a child with one.
I called my dad on the way home letting him know the news. Like I expected he was shocked but then he told me by some chance he was heading up to a meeting later that day with the founders of operation smile and we both decided that it would be a good idea if I joined. As we sat down with bill and kathy I could barely get my words out I was so emotional. But instead of jumping into telling me all about how this was fixable he slowly took my hand, looked me in the eyes and asked me how I was doing. He told me he understood. He really took the time to connect with me and in doing so I knew right then and there that I was going to get though this. I had the support of my loving husband and family and now the support from bill and kathy who made it there life mission to find and fix children who had the same exact condition that my baby would have.
The next step for me was to go to the Fetal Medicine Group for a 3D ultrasound to see in-depth, what kind of cleft my little baby had and to see if possible if she had a cleft palate also. I highly recommend going to a place like this just so you can get as much information you can on the condition your child's cleft is. They told me it looked like a unilateral cleft, gave me a packet on surgeons around my area and sent me on my way. All I could do now as let my little baby grow healthy and strong until it was time to meet her.