A bad day...

I'm a keen gambler so I know quite a bit about playing the odds. Unfortunately you can store what I know about the childbirth process on a back of a stamp.

These two factors have conspired to make this a bad day, when it should have been a great one. You see we've had the initial scan that shows there's actually a baby there, which is great.

Then they sit us down and tell us that because of the missus' age the risk of it having Downs is potentially 1 in 190 or worse. Jesus.

I was aware that these risks got higher the older the mother is, but I always assumed that we were talking about one in two thousand rather than, say, one in a million if mum is in her early 20s.

How wrong I clearly was. An optimist might say that it still represents about a 99.5% chance things will be OK, but look at it another way - if I was in a room of 190 people and we all had a raffle ticket, I would wait around for first prize to be drawn coz I'd think I had a puncher's chance at those odds.

And I'm sorry for any pro-lifers reading this...I am barely going to be man enough to cope with fatherhood if everything is tickety-boo, I'm certainly not going to be able to cope with a Downs child.

So now we're on tenterhooks until some more definitive tests can be done next week. If we're lucky our risk factor will move up the scale into the 'safer' categories of 1 in 340 or higher (still not great, but beginning to be comforting odds).

If we're not, it could go the other way, then we have to think about nasty invasive testing that is definitive but opens up a small but significant risk of miscarriage. What a position to find yourself in, having to make that judgement call....

This is a very bad day...with luck it will prove to be the worst day and things will be OK. I'm not ready to contemplate worse days ahead right now...