A cautious, yet hopeful update

Yes, it's been weeks since I've written anything. I haven't had it in me. It's almost as if I've been too afraid to open my mouth, to search for the words to describe how it feels to wait - to long for - a baby whose safe arrival is nowhere near guaranteed. I've felt like catastrophe has lingered only a breath away, that if I let my guard down for a single second this baby would disappear into thin air just like it feels her big brother Max did, before I ever had a chance to fight for him.

After all of our careful surveillance, our watchful wondering, our midnight worrying, against all the odds we seemingly faced, though, here we are at 30 WEEKS, hopeful and hell-bent on delivering our daughter and bringing her home from the hospital. The survival rate for babies born at 30 weeks is 95%, and whilst we know all too intimately how easily you can fall on the wrong side of even promising statistics, it's a hell of a lot more reassuring than the spectre of certain death that faced us at 23 or 24 weeks. It's 'likely', they tell me, that this baby will be just fine. After months of expecting and preparing for the worst this is a revelation that has proven very difficult to get our heads around. Suddenly we have to start practicing an entirely new way of thinking - one where we prepare for our daughter's eventual homecoming.f  the

The expert monitoring we have received from our wonderful obstetricians at the Royal Women's Hospital has been incredible reassuring during these long, difficult weeks. My cervix has shown no signs of shortening or opening so far. At 26 weeks, however, one of the other predictive tests I'd been having regularly, which measures the presence of of a substance called fetal fibronectin in the cervix, came back positive during our final appointment in the specialist preterm labour clinic. What did this mean? Well, potentially everything, but just as likely nothing at all. While a negative fibronectin result is a very reliable indicator that you're not going to go into labour in the next 7-10 days, a positive result merely leaves you with the very unsatisfactory knowledge that there's a 50/50 chance you will go into labour any time from then. This news sent me spinning for a little while as I realised I'd dared to get a bit confident as the weeks had passed by without incident. Now the prospect of labour began to signal for me the beginnings of an imminent disaster all over again.

There's not a lot they do differently after a positive fibronectin test when you remain otherwise asymptomatic. I was given two precautionary injections of steroids to help mature our little girl's lungs in the event that she did arrive in the next little while. I was grateful for this intervention. I am grateful for anything I can do to increase her chances, however minimally. All we've been able to do in the month since then has been watch and wait - words we are beginning to really, really hate. So many things are out of our hands, but dare I say that despite this, everything seems to be going OK?

It's been nice to have only 'normal' pregnancy symptoms to complain about over the last week or two - breathlessness, fatigue, and slightly tender ribs as our baby begins taking up her fair share of the space in there. I've also had to cut out ALL SUGAR (ahhh) due to a borderline gestational diabetes result, which came back one point below the acceptable threshold. But what price a living, healthy baby, huh? If only curtailing your desperate craving for lemonade could guarantee you one of those we could all breath easy again.

30 weeks. Elation. Disbelief. Hope. Love.