The Idea Baby

Jon and I thought we had everything when I got pregnant right away after the misscarriage. A month after we found out I was pregnant, we found out that I was not. I had a blighted ovum, a fertilized egg in which the sac and placenta develop, but no fetus. While my body was phisically pregnant, we had no child.

In a way, that made it easier. We hadn't lost another baby. We didn't need a second name to give to a lost soul. But on the other hand, we were still sad and disapointed. We had spent the last month talking to and encouraging a baby that wasn't there. We lost an idea baby.

An idea baby, one that only exsisted as an idea. In my own personal belief system, your mind is a powerful tool to make things real. Your religion, what ever it may be is real, because your mind makes it real, and while others in your religion share parts of that reality, individual variations makes everyone's reality a little bit diffrent. (Which is why wars about religion are stupid, but that's another matter.)

To us, my second pregnancy was a baby that we loved. We made it real with our minds. And instead of giving it a name, we gave it a concept. A much more fitting thing for a baby that was never there. We called it the idea baby. We loved our idea baby.

Blighted ovum is not something many people have heard about. Some of our friends doubted that such a thing was possible. One of Jon's co-workers suggested that our doctor was lying to us. But it does happen.

Occasionally the term blighted ovum is used to describe a missed abortion, which Aubrey, our first child was. A missed abortion is where the fetus dies, but is not expelled from the womans uterus. Eventually if no treatment is given, the fetus and placenta are reabsorbed into the mother's body and she looses all pregnancy symptoms.

A true blighted ovum is diffrent. When a fertilized egg begins to divide it has two halves. The half that is the fetus, and the half that is the amniotic sac and the placenta. In a blighted ovum the placenta/sac half grows but the fetus half, for some reason does not. This often is aborted so quickly that all the woman experiences is a late or heavy period. Sometimes during that lateness, a woman will get a faint positive on a home pregnancy test, only to get her period later. That is called a chemical pregnancy.

Now and then an idea baby is formed. The parents know they are pregnant, and it has been confirmed by their OB and they are excited and happy. And later they find out that there was no baby, only an empty sac. Be sad if this has happened to you. Don't feel silly for mourning a life that wasn't there, because it was. You made it real with your mind. You had an idea baby, just like us.

Good bye little raspberry baby.