The Burke Family

My name is Hope Burke. My husband Joshua and I have been married since 2010. I am a stay at home mom to two beautiful kids. Our daughter Kaleya was born January 24, 2010 and she is so amazing. She has always been a good little girl with excellent manners and a caring heart. She became big sister to our son Reyden on July 31, 2012.  Reyden is a spunky redhead and full on boy! He is quite the handful and is always getting in to something! But his sweet little smile always wins us back over!

After deciding we were ready for another baby we started trying. We found out we were expecting our third child on May 30, 2014! We visited the our local pregnancy care center and after an ultrasound were told our baby was due February 8, 2015. We were very excited!

Our life was pretty simple. Our life was normal. And all of that changed on September 19, 2014. We went to our normal doctors office for our 20 week ultrasound. Kaleya was so excited to see the baby. I told her about the "magic wand" that they use to see inside my belly. The ultrasound tech is very nice. She lets the kids feel the jelly that she put on my stomach and they really liked that. She is talking and taking measurements and everything is fine. After a while she starts asking questions. About my LMP and what my due date was. I told her if you go off LMP my due date is January 25 but at our 10 week ultrasound they told us February 8. She is busy with her measurements. And you know the thought never occurred to me "something is wrong." Not even when she didn't take the time to show us our baby's face. Still not when she didn't print any pictures for us. She hustled out the door saying she had to talk to Dr. Cline. She comes back and says Dr. Cline wants to talk to us. So we pick up our stuff and move to an exam room and wait. We are a little irritated because Joshua has to work today and they were already behind schedule. Dr. Cline comes in and asks us how we are, talks to the kids and tries to get Reyden to give her a hug. She then looks at us and tells us that the ventricles in our baby's brain are measuring too large. Ventricles hold fluid in the brain. That's normal. Our baby has TOO MUCH fluid. She doesn't know what caused this. She refers us to a High Risk OB at St. Vincent. Their technology is better and they can tell us more about our baby. She said most of the time it's nothing, they say "Oh this will be fine, Baby will grow into it" but -worst case scenario- it could mean Down Syndrome, Mental Delay, or other health issues. I can not explain to you exactly how it feels to hear that the baby that you thought was perfect, isn't. That something is wrong. It's absolutely terrifying. This was Friday. Our appointment was Tuesday. That was the longest weekend of worrying I had ever experienced.