Dear Hollywood, My Pregnancy Hates You.

I love to watch medical shows and read about medical things, but today I watched the wrong TV show and read the wrong thing.  Some things, I've learned, you shouldn't watch when you're expecting because what you should expect when your expecting is to be deeply affected by sad sad things.

I watched Private Practice tonight. It was just the last half hour, but it was enough to break my heart. One of the main characters was, of all things, in labor. That would have been fine, but of  course, since it's a soap opera of a medical show, something terrible had to happen.


That something terrible was a horrible and uncommon birth defect that only 1 in approx 5,000 pregnancies result in: Anencephaly . It's a defect that occurs because the part of the baby that grows into its brain, the neural tube doesn't develop right and the child is born with all or part of his or her brain missing. It's absolutely incurable, and almost invariably, the baby dies at birth. very rarely babies with this defect will survive a few years. In fact, just recently, a baby with this birth defect, Nicholas Coke, survived to his second birthday, but that's even more rare than having a baby with the disorder. (see video below) Unfortunately, the window of opportunity occurs within the first few weeks of pregnancy, often before the woman is aware of her pregnancy, and since it's so often fatal anyway and can be detected during pregnancy via ultrasound, affected babies are very commonly aborted.

Of course, the baby in the show didn't survive, but for dramatic affect, the writers had to drag it out and make it as emotional as possible. The mother, a couple weeks ago, found out in her ultrasound that her baby didn't have a brain, but she decided to carry it to term and deliver. (...And yes this outs my stupidity. I've been watching the program ever since this sad, horrible, awful storyline started.) Well, after 3 or four weeks of dragging out a heartbreaking TV pregnancy, the moment came to bring the storyline to it's climax. Finally, it came time for her to deliver. In the moments after birth, she holds the poor baby who can't open his eyes because he doesn't have any, kisses him, takes off his hospital hat to reveal a misshapen head, and tearfully declares him the most beautiful baby in the world. She sobs as he begins to go into respiratory arrest, and realizes that she has to say goodbye. She hands him off to the waiting doctors. They take him away. They take him away to harvest his organs for donation. The episode closes in the operating room, as the doctors remove one tiny little organ at a time to sweet, powerful, heartbreaking music and send them to other babies all over the country.

That was too much for this pregnant momma. I was immediately reduced to an inconsolable pile of tissue and tears. I didn't even know a birth defect like that existed! Now I know why the doctor simply tells you to take your prenatal vitamin to help your baby be healthy. If he tells you what bad can happen if you don't, he'd be referring his patients to psychiatrists instead of pharmacists to pick up their pills!

Dear Hollywood, My pregnancy hates your stinking guts.