I hadn’t started studying photography until after my second son was born, and I was all sorts of excited to document this little human’s birth. Along with my camera, I packed plenty of swaddles with matching headbands (first girl!) and my letter board. I was all set for the perfect documentary newborn images of my dreams.
Well, the big delivery day arrived and we were ready to go! My water broke and the contractions were coming on strong so we headed to the hospital. While I was in labor we walked the halls, admiring all the beautiful baby pictures on the walls and wondering what our girl would be like. And then she was here! And I knew immediately that all the doctors had missed something big. It was obvious to me (and everyone else) the first time I saw her that she had Down syndrome. This was confirmed a few days later via a genetic test.
That first night, they whisked my baby off to the NICU, and I was left to wrap my mind around what was happening. In the NICU they immediately hooked her up to some low flow oxygen and ran the labs for the genetic test. Because babies with Down syndrome are often born with heart defects, they also took a preliminary x-ray of her chest. The nurses kept asking me if her prenatal ultrasounds had shown any heart issues, and I told them with confidence that her heart was fine. They commented over and over how fortunate that was! Later the next day we got the results of the x-ray which validated my response: it looked clear. The nurses congratulated us again, but I just couldn’t get past the Down syndrome thing so the heart tests seemed secondary. I think God was being merciful and giving me one thing to swallow at a time. We were about to get not just one but two devastating, life-changing diagnoses.
As for my camera, it took me a long time to take any pictures. Instead of natural light streaming over a baby resting peacefully in sweet clothes, I had harsh light behind curtains in a back corner of the NICU, and an inert baby covered in monitors, tubes, and wires. Clicking that shutter made my new reality a little too real, and it took me a long time and definitely some conscientious efforts at courage to embrace our new story.
