The Chicken Diaries - Week 2

Oh dear.

Mary started limping the other week and now is looking pretty lame. Her right leg looked as if it was dislocated at the hip and it was rotating at a weird angle. She would walk with one leg twisted a full 180 degrees and was in fact scrambling along, rather than hobbling. She could still move it and grip with it and scratch her head but she looked really awkward.

I did take pictures of them at 2 weeks.

Bubbles

Cacciatore

Mary

Spot

Heaps more feathers in, and Cacciatore has tail feathers coming in.

However, on 21 January I took Mary to the vet to see if I could do anything for her about her leg. The vet said that chickens can do well with their leg amputated but she was too young for an anaesthetic, and that she had actually broken/dislocated her knee joint which was causing her pain when we touched it. The leg was also warmer than the other leg, indicating it was inflamed or swollen, and the vet advised that I euthanase her, so I did, sadly. We explained to my son what had happened, and he had lots of questions about what happened to her and why is she going to sleep, but we said she had to go to chicken heaven because her leg was too sore. He asked if he could get another Mary, and I think we will, but I might get a purebred heritage chook so we can have a varied flock. And I want a hen not a rooster!

So now I am down to 3 chicks. I weighed them last week:

 (Clockwise from top left - Bubbles, Cacciatore, Mary, Spot).

I weighed them today and they had put on a lot of weight!

Mary - 150g (weighed at the vet)

Spot - 165g

Bubbles -146g

Cacciatore - 136g

 I'll weigh them again at the 3 week mark, and see how much weight they put on in just 4 days!

New Vaccination Laws in NSW

Recently the government introduced some tough new vaccination laws.  Under the new laws, unvaccinated children will be excluded from child care centres unless they can provide evidence from their GPs why their children cannot be vaccinated OR for religious reasons, the child cannot be vaccinated.

This has sparked a huge debate, and there are many opinions about this matter.

What is interesting is what some people have done to exploit loopholes in this system.

Recently in the news, a group of anti-vaccination campaigners have decided to create their own religion to use this loophole to circumvent the government's new law.  This will negate the government's attempt to boost public health awareness in preventable diseases.

Why are people refusing to vaccinate?

1. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a paper in the Lancet suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.  This was later found to be fraudulent, with Wakefield found to have fixed and manipulated data, as well as having a conflict of interest in publishing the paper by receiving £55000 from lawyers looking for evidence against vaccine manufacturers.  Since then, there have been multiple research papers with no link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
2. Herd immunity - if the vaccination rate is 95% then the 5% who are not vaccinated will be protected.  This is often the case for cancer patients and young babies as their immunity is low and it is they who will be put at risk.  If everyone is immune, then they will be protected as the disease will be unable to get a foothold.  Those parents who choose not to vaccinate believe that the herd immunity will help protect their child, which is probably true.
3. Building immunity naturally without chemicals and toxins.  Vaccines used to contain heavy metals, formaldehyde - things which nobody would want injected into them.  Our body was made with an immune system to fight disease - we should use it.  (though it's funny - vaccines stimulate your immune system to fight the disease, not give immunity passively)
4. Belief that vaccines don't work.

I am a health care professional, so perhaps my opinion is skewed.  Of course I will be a believer in the modern vaccine.  Giving your child a weak strain of a disease so that they can build up immunity to the strong strain is a great advance in modern medicine.

Measles is a childhood illness but the most serious complications can be panencephalitis (infection of the brain) which can cause permanent brain damage or death.  The risk of that is low - maybe 1:100,000.  It can also cause pneumonia which is very serious in adults - in 1920, the death rate from measles pneumonia was 30%. Of course with modern medicine that would be a lot less.

Mumps is generally a benign illness but can cause unilateral deafness in 1:2000 patients.  Panencephalitis can also occur.

Rubella is not a serious illness in childhood, but it causes significant problems in pregnancy.  Rubella is responsible for stillbirth in early pregnancy, and significant congenital defects in the heart, brain, eyes and ears, resulting in congenital heart defects, congenital cataracts, and deafness.  The vaccine was mainly developed to prevent infection during pregnancy.

I am not sure that restricting unvaccinated from childcare is the correct decision.  I agree that reducing their welfare payments for unvaccinated children as well as increasing health insurance premiums would be a better way to deal with the problem.  Drop the child care rebate for unvaccinated children.  They can still go to childcare but the government isn't going to help pay for them to go when they are disregarding publich health and safety.  The unvaccinated child should have the same rights as a vaccinated one - but just as we cannot force people to drive with their headlights on, we should be aware that they are compromising the safety of others, and they should be penalised for that.

I remember the case of the 4 week old baby who died from whooping cough in one of the lowest areas of vaccination in the state - that was 4 years ago.  That news item prompted a big push for vaccination. However, what I did not realise is that the anti-vaccinaters had a hate compaign against that family, who had already suffered enough.  Some of the comments or letters they received included:

• "harden the f*** up"
• "I could walk through a ward of babies dying of whooping cough or any other infectious disease and it would not affect my decision to vaccinate my children."

It must be hard enough to lose your own child without having to endure this insensitive barrage as well.

They are not the only ones.  Another father, whose son died of chicken pox, was rung by anti-vaccination campaigners who said this:

• His son must have been weak, to have succumbed to such a harmless disease.  These things are a matter of survival of the fittest.

I urge everyone, to consider vaccinating your child - if not for their own safety, for the safety of others - including your own unborn children.

OMG I deleted my England photos!

I only realised this because I was looking for my pictures of the elephant in Greenwich, when I realised... that they aren't on my computer.

And I had deleted them from my laptop last week, thinking they were already on my computer.

SO I LOST ALL MY ENGLAND PHOTOS! WAAAH!

It's not horribly horrible, because I do have a few pictures blogged, but the personal photos with pictures of my sister and me, are not there.  They aren't on the camera card either - I wiped that to make room for the eclipse.

BOO HOO!!!!

I have little hope in trying to retrieve them from my laptop, but I can try.

GDI.  I am so stupid.

Mona Simpson's Eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs

It is not often that I read anything in the paper that moves me to tears.  I even remember the last time I had tears in my eyes from anything in the news, and that was a few months after I had Julian, and there was a run of toddler deaths on the news and my eyes were stinging from unshed tears - I blamed the hormones, baby blues or whatever fancy name they have for it these days.

Today, I finished late at work and I came home and read the paper.  One of the articles was a picture of Steve Jobs with the caption "Steve Jobs's last words: 'Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow'.

I read the brief highlights of the eulogy - and this line captured my attention:

"Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me," she wrote.

"For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother."

I was curious.  So I clicked on the link to find out more about this long lost sister that was trusted with the eulogy of one of the world's most famous, and richest, men.

This was the eulogy published in Sunday's New York Times:

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

By the end of it, tears were pouring down my face.  What a beautifully written tribute to her brother.  The admiration and love for him was shining from her words, and she described him in the brightest of lights.

I remember when I heard Steve Jobs died.  I was at work, in the private hospital.  Someone walked into my theatre and said Steve Jobs had died.  I said, but I just read the paper, I didn't see that in the paper.  So back I went to the Sydney Morning Herald and it was splashed all over the front page.  I sms'd my sister, who was sleeping.  When she woke up she said "Who?" but I knew she would realise who it was as soon as I said "CEO of Apple".

I never really knew anything about Steve Jobs except that he had so many funky ideas for Apple.  I knew he was one of the creators, kicked out and then came back and made Apple even more fantastic than it had been before.  He was what I imagined famous CEOs to be - full of ideas, faces for the company, the symbol of their brand.  He also seemed to be a bit of hippy to me as well - I heard he tried alternative treatments for his cancer before he returned to conventional medicine.

So I was a bit sad, but not overwhelmed or moved to tears at his death.  People die.  A sad day for Apple and Steve Jobs' family.  But I thought nothing more of it except that I'm sure that multiple biographies and stories and quotes would flood the internet for a while.  Maybe there would even be a limited edition iPod with a tribute signiture or something for those die hard Apple fans.  I thought no more on it.

Until today.

So after reading it, I thought I had to put it here so I could read it again without having to google it, and remember the feelings I felt when I read it.  Admiration for his determination.  I could feel the love his sister felt.  The sadness of losing a sibling, which you felt was before his time.  The desperation of a man who had so many things he wanted to do and not enough time to do it.

Baby slings and how to keep your baby safe

An article today in the Sydney Morning Herald about a 2 day old South Australian baby who died while being carried in a sling under his mother's clothing is an awful tragedy.  In a letter to the Medical Journal of Australia, published today, two pathology experts say as tests found no other explanation for the Adelaide baby's death the cause was recorded as undetermined, but the sling was "considered a risk factor".  This is the first known fatality of a baby in a sling recorded in Australia.  There have been 16 deaths reported in the United States and Canada attributed to baby slings.

One thing to note here was that the poor mother was wearing the baby under the mother's shirt and jumper.  Which in itself is dangerous, as being under all those clothes can also cause suffocation.

The ACCC has issued a saftey alert for baby slings and there may be soon be mandatory safety standards.

Having used slings for both my babies I am going to share what I know about the safe use of baby slings:

• Always be able to keep a visual contact with your baby.  I never had my infant under clothing, the sling was always on the outside of my clothing (I even bought a second, bigger size sling so I could compensate for clothing)
• Avoid excessive neck flexion and nose/mouth pressing against the cloth or your skin.  This can lead to suffocation.  I found that the sling would often put them in that position and you would have to turn them slightly so they face more upwards rather than into your chest (though that chest facing position was good for breastfeeding if you wanted to breastfeed your baby in your sling)
• Be vigilant!  I know it can be hard when you're busy with a few kids but I did try to make sure I could hear breathing or some kind of noise from the baby.
• Don't lean forward excessively with the baby - squat lift things - otherwise your baby could tumble out of the sling.
• Never eat hot food or hot drinks while carrying baby in a baby sling!  You could spill it on the baby.

I used Jazsling and Peanut Shell slings for my kids.  This picture shows the correct positioning of the baby in the sling.  Facing outwards, outside of the clothing, and in easy visual contact with the parent.  Jazslings are very light, and at the time quite cheap!  They are a bit more pricey now, and you can also breastfeed with them, but I was never very successful at doing that.

How reading women's magazines at work can bring you down....

I picked up the November 2010 issue of Marie Claire to read at work today and instead of perusing the latest styles of swimsuits (which unfortunately with my post-2-children figure consisting of pot belly and saggy boobs won't suit me!) I end up reading all these sad and dreadful stories - not unlike picking up the newspaper.

The first depressing story is about a Brazilian soccer player who had a lover brutally murdered because she refused to abort a pregnancy after a one night stand with him.  She was chopped into pieces and fed to some dogs after days of beatings and torture.  The poor baby boy, growing up knowing that his biological father did that to his mother.... ugh.

The second depressing story was about life for people after the China earthquake in Sichuan province where whole families were lost.  It was the story of 2 survivors, both of which lost their families in the quake.  The man lost his wife and 7 year old son, the woman her fiance.  There were lots of stories about how the school collapsed and all the children died... in a country where 1 child policy stands and your only child was killed, how can one read that as a parent and shudder to think if that had been yourself and your children?  Anyway, the story was that these 2 people deciding to form a family together, and that lots of widows and widowers from the Sichuan earthquake did the same thing.

The third story was about Generation Z.  About how children these days have little attention in classrooms, have tantrums and are generally indulgent and very me me me.  And this is all the fault of the parents.  Because we cocoon our children and shield them from sadness and failure (eg by no longer giving Fs, or ensuring that every child gets a ribbon in a race, not just for the 1st 2nd 3rd) they cannot deal with failure and expect everything.  After reading that article I'm trying to think how I can prevent my children from being like that.  The last thing I need is 2 indulgent teenagers who want me to subject to their every whim.  Hopefully with continued discipline and instilling in the kids the ability to save for things they want and give praise where praise is due then I can hopefully get some well adjusted kids out of the toddlers I have now.

In remembrance of E2B

My BIL and SIL are going back to Taiwan after they see the specialist on Thursday.  They are going to abort the baby there.

I just want to have a small memorium thing here for E2B (emily2be).  Though I didn't know her, I would have loved her and helped to take care of her and she would have been my special little niece.  Because her life would have been short, I would have tried to make it as happy as possible with cuddles, kisses and carries.

I hope she can forgive us all for taking away her life, and if she understands that it was so she wouldn't suffer and have a miserable life.  I hope that the spark of life that she had will be born again in this world as something beautiful.  I am sure she would have been proud, and hated to be a burden to anyone.  And that though it seems like nobody loves her because we could so easily throw her away, that we are saddened by her loss.

I hope you don't have to suffer little E2B.  I love you.

Sad news

Yesterday hubby rang me to say that my sister-in-law went for a scan of the baby and that they found an abnormality.  He said there were some cysts in the liver and it was enlarged.  He wanted me to go and ask the advice of my colleagues about what it was... but without the report or anything I didn't think I could offer any advice, and that they should go see a specialist.

When the formal report came, it was actually that BOTH kidneys were abnormal.  One had cysts in it and was enlarged, the other was hypoechoic with a dilated renal pelvis.  The AFI was normal which was reassuring (ie kidney function was probably normal) but the other bit is pretty bad.  From my limited medical knowledge, it seems to be juvenile polycystic kidney disease which is autosomal recessive disorder, and has a poor prognosis.  If it is diagnosed at 24 weeks then the prognosis is worse.  It is characterised by hyperechoic kidneys, cysts develop later in infancy.  I suppose the presence of cysts already could indicate really bad disease.

Severe cases have hyponatremia and other metabolic disorders and recurrent urinary tract infections, and are not expected to live more than one month.  If the child lives to 18 months then they can be considered for renal transplant.

That's just talking about PCKD AD.  I don't really know what they have.  I am not sure there is any genetic testing they could do.  My poor SIL is so upset, she wants to have the pregnancy terminated.  Unfortunately she will have to deliver the baby vaginally if that is the case which is all the more traumatic.  Currently the foetus is still viable and at 30 weeks has a good chance of survival (without the kidney troubles).  I have to say if the situation was reversed and it was me facing this dilemma I am not sure what I would do.  I know I would not want the poor child to suffer, but I suspect that I would have the baby and let the baby pass away on her own.  It is a terrible thing to have to do, or even have to contemplate, but I think my poor SIL is too shocked and upset to be thinking about anything other than to get the abnormality/mutant out...

Then today I walked into birthing unit and the educator was wrapping up a dead baby.  A little boy.  The mother had an abruption and was transferred from another hospital to here, and the baby died en route whilst the mother bled to a haemoglobin of 60 and required a blood transfusion.  The mother is of Arabic origin, and she has 6 daughters at home, and the baby that died was a little boy.  She was very sad, and worried that the husband would blame her for losing the son (boys are very important in arabic culture as they seem to be in almost every culture!) because she had had a fall and that caused the abruption.  So sad to see all these little lives lost, who never got to know their future.

I think that about my niece-to-be.  What could she have been like?  Would she have done great things, made some great changes to someone's life, influenced the world somehow in that small butterfly effect way?  The way things are going, I don't think I'll ever get to meet her, and she will never get to do anything in her short life.  And though babies should bring joy to people's lives, her being born will only bring sadness, and what is even more sad is that maybe nobody wants her because she's got an abnormality.  If she gets born, I doubt that she will be born here, they will probably go back to Taiwan (in fact I recommended that they go back to Taiwan so my SIL can have the support of her family there).

I just have to be thankful that I have 2 children who are happy and healthy so far.  Who knows what tragedy may befall  them further down the track.  I should enjoy them now and every minute I can spend with them.