The Night I Searched for a Diagnosis

🇯🇵 Read in Japanese

Even after we came home, the words the doctor had said during the examination would not leave my mind.

“The bones in her arms and legs look a little shorter than expected.”

“There are some things we’d like to look at more carefully.”

The doctor had told us that nothing had been diagnosed yet, that every baby grows differently, and that there were still many things that could not be determined at that stage of pregnancy.

I understood what he was saying.

At least, I thought I did.

But even though nothing had been confirmed, somewhere inside me, it already felt as though something enormous had happened.

The house looked exactly the same as it had that morning.

The furniture had not moved.

The light coming through the windows was the same.

Everything around me was unchanged, and yet I felt as though I had come home to a completely different world.

My husband seemed much calmer than I was.

He changed his clothes, moved around the house, and spoke in almost the same way he always did.

Looking back now, I am sure he had worries of his own, and perhaps being calm was simply the way he dealt with them.

But at the time, I could not see any of that.

All I could think was,

How can you be so calm?

This is our child.

I’m terrified.

Why does it feel like I’m the only one who is afraid?

I knew, somewhere deep down, that my husband cared about our baby just as much as I did.

But I was already so overwhelmed by my own fear that I had no room left to imagine what he might have been feeling.

I barely had an appetite.

Even when food was placed in front of me, the words from the examination kept returning to my mind, and every time I remembered them, the tight feeling in my chest came back.

Then I would place my hand over my stomach.

Our baby would move.

For a few seconds, I would feel relieved.

She was still there.

She was still moving.

Nothing about her movements felt different from the day before.

But that sense of relief never lasted very long.

Eventually, I picked up my phone.

I opened the search bar and began typing in every word I could remember from the examination.

“Fetal arms and legs short.”

“Short long bones.”

“Pregnancy short bones disease.”

At first, I thought I would search for only a few minutes.

I wanted to understand what the doctor had seen, and I thought that if I could find an explanation, maybe I would feel less afraid.

Instead, one search led to another.

Unfamiliar medical terms appeared on the screen.

Genetic conditions.

Bone disorders.

Complications.

Growth problems.

Words about inheritance.

Words about treatment.

Words about the future.

I would open one page and find another term I did not understand.

Then I would search that term.

That search would lead me to another condition, and that condition would lead me to another article.

Before I knew it, I had gone far beyond anything the doctor had actually told us.

Nothing had been diagnosed.

We had not been told that our daughter definitely had any particular condition.

And yet, as I continued reading, I began to see our baby in every page.

If a condition mentioned short arms or legs, I thought,

Maybe this is it.

If it mentioned problems with growth, I thought,

What if this is what she has?

If it described complications, I began imagining those complications happening to our daughter.

The more I searched, the further into the future my mind traveled.

What if she has one of these conditions?

What if she has difficulty walking?

What if there are problems with her eyes or ears?

What will happen when she starts school?

Will she be able to do the same things as the other children?

Will she have friends?

Will she be hurt by the things people say?

What kind of life will she have when she grows up?

Before our daughter had even been born, I had already imagined years and years of her life.

School.

Friendships.

Adulthood.

A future that did not even exist yet.

Looking back now, I realize that I was no longer looking at the baby who was actually inside me.

I was looking at a future created almost entirely by fear.

But at the time, I did not know how to stop.

Eventually, I turned to my husband.

“What if she has one of these conditions?”

I showed him some of the things I had been reading.

“What are we going to do?”

My husband listened and then said,

“We won’t know until the time comes.”

I hated that answer.

“Aren’t you worried?”

I asked him.

Of course I was worried.

I was terrified.

How could he not be?

My husband thought for a moment before answering.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen yet. There’s no point worrying about a future we don’t even know.”

Maybe he was right.

Now, when I look back on that time, I can understand what he was trying to say.

But back then, I did not want a reasonable answer.

I did not want someone to explain to me why worrying was useless.

What I wanted was much simpler.

“This is scary.”

“I’m worried too.”

“We’ll figure it out together.”

Those were the words I wanted to hear.

I wanted him to carry just a little of the fear with me.

I did not want him to panic.

I did not want him to cry the way I cried or stay awake searching through medical websites with me until the middle of the night.

I simply wanted to know that I was not standing alone in that dark place.

But my husband told me,

“Nothing has been decided yet, so you don’t need to think that far ahead.”

He also said that constantly worrying and crying about things that had not happened yet could not be good for the baby.

That made me even angrier.

I was not worrying because I wanted to worry.

I was not crying because I wanted to cry.

If someone had shown me a switch that could turn off the fear, I would have pressed it immediately.

I wanted to stop thinking.

I wanted to go back to the way I had felt before that appointment.

But I could not.

I was simply afraid.

We argued.

It was not really about whether my husband was right or whether I was right.

What hurt me was the feeling that he did not understand how frightened I was.

And then I cried.

I cried because I was scared for our baby.

But once I started crying, another thought entered my mind.

What if my stress is bad for her?

What if all this crying affects the baby?

I was afraid for my daughter, and then I became afraid that my fear itself might somehow hurt her.

It felt as though there was no right way to feel.

No matter what I did, I worried that I was doing something wrong.

Now, looking back, I think my husband may have been trying to protect both me and our daughter in his own way.

While I was trying to prepare myself for every possible future, perhaps he was trying to protect the life we still had in the present.

Maybe he believed that there was no reason to let something that had not happened yet take away the days we still had with our baby inside me.

If he had become as frightened as I was, if he had sat beside me saying,

“What are we going to do?”

“This could be terrible.”

“What if our lives become completely different?”

perhaps the two of us would have fallen even deeper into fear.

Perhaps, before we even knew anything for certain, we might have begun looking at our daughter herself as something frightening.

At the time, I could not understand that.

His calmness simply felt cold.

I felt as though I was the only one who was afraid.

The only one imagining what might happen.

The only one worrying about our daughter’s future.

But while my husband and I argued about a future neither of us could see, our baby continued to move quietly inside me.

She knew nothing about the search results on my phone.

She knew nothing about the names of the diseases I had been reading about.

She knew nothing about the years of her life I had already imagined in my head.

She was simply there.

Growing.

Moving.

Living.

The search results on my phone were still filled with unfamiliar medical names.

Even after I closed the screen, the words did not disappear from my mind.

But when I finally put my phone down and rested my hand on my stomach again, our daughter moved beneath my hand.

While I had been traveling ten, twenty, even thirty years into her future in my mind, she had been living only in that moment.

I did not fully understand it then.

But now I know.

Our daughter was not the diagnosis I was searching for.

She was not the complications listed on a website.

She was not the frightening future I had created inside my head.

She was simply our daughter, growing inside me one day at a time.

And when I reached seven months of pregnancy, it was finally time for us to visit the large hospital we had been referred to.

There, the doctors would examine her much more carefully.

Part of me wanted answers more than anything.

Another part of me was terrified of what those answers might be.

I wanted to know.

And I did not want to know.

Carrying both of those feelings with me, I placed my hand over my growing stomach and waited for the day we would make the long drive to the hospital.

Seven Months Pregnant, and the Large Hospital

🇯🇵 Read in Japanese

By the time I was seven months pregnant, it was finally time for us to visit the large hospital we had been referred to.

The hospital was far from our home.

It took about ninety minutes by car, and when traffic was heavy, the drive could take nearly two hours.

My husband drove.

I sat in the passenger seat with one hand resting over my stomach, watching the scenery pass outside the window while trying not to imagine what might be waiting for us at the end of the journey.

I wanted to know what was happening to our baby.

I wanted someone to examine her carefully and give us answers.

At the same time, I was terrified that once we knew more, we might never be able to return to the life we had before.

Part of me desperately wanted the doctors to say,

“Everything is fine.”

Another part of me almost wished we could leave without hearing anything at all.

I wanted to know.

But only if the answer was something I could bear.

When we arrived, the hospital felt completely different from the obstetrics clinic I had been visiting before.

The building was enormous, the waiting areas were crowded, and everywhere I looked there seemed to be people carrying circumstances I knew nothing about.

There were families smiling together.

Parents holding small babies.

Children sitting beside their mothers and fathers.

There were also people who looked exhausted, families sitting silently, and people whose expressions made me wonder what they had just been told.

Once, I saw a family crying so intensely that they could no longer hide their grief.

I remember looking at them and thinking,

Maybe one day, that could be us.

Until then, the possibility that something might be different about our baby had frightened me, but some part of it still felt distant.

Inside that hospital, surrounded by families who were already living through realities I had only imagined, the fear suddenly felt much closer.

Eventually, my name was called.

I entered the examination room and lay down on the bed.

The gel was spread over my stomach, the ultrasound probe touched my skin, and once again our daughter appeared on the screen.

She was moving.

A lot.

Whenever the doctor tried to find the right angle, she seemed to move away from it, shifting her body or moving her arms and legs as though she had no intention of making the examination easy.

For a moment, I smiled.

She’s here.

She’s moving.

She’s alive.

In those brief moments, the fear became quieter.

But then the detailed examination began.

Each ultrasound took around thirty minutes.

The doctors examined her head.

Her abdomen.

Her heart.

Her blood flow.

Her internal organs.

And her bones.

Everything was checked carefully, one part at a time.

The doctor would find the right position, draw a line across the screen, measure it, check the number, change the angle, and sometimes measure the same area again.

I watched every movement.

I did not understand most of the numbers.

I did not know what each measurement was supposed to be.

But I had become very sensitive to silence.

Whenever the doctor stopped talking and stared at the screen for too long, fear immediately returned.

Her heart was beating properly.

Her blood flow looked good.

Her internal organs were carefully checked, and no major problems were found there.

Her head and body were growing.

But her bones were short.

Especially her femur and humerus.

The doctor displayed the bones on the screen and measured them carefully from one end to the other.

When I saw the growth chart, I began to understand that while other parts of her body were continuing to grow, the lengths of her bones were not keeping up in the same way.

I remember thinking,

So it really is her bones.

What had first been noticed during an ordinary prenatal ultrasound was no longer something I could dismiss as a small difference or a measurement error.

The doctors began talking to us about possible genetic causes and different conditions that could affect bone growth.

There were so many unfamiliar names.

I tried to listen carefully, but sometimes the words seemed to pass straight through me.

Nothing had been confirmed.

There was still no final diagnosis.

But with every examination, the possibility that our daughter had some kind of skeletal condition became more real.

Still, not every moment in that room was frightening.

Sometimes, after examining her organs and bones, the doctor would try to find a good angle to show us her face.

One day, our daughter’s face appeared directly on the screen.

Her eyes—or what looked like her eyes on the ultrasound—were surprisingly clear.

The doctor looked at the image and said,

“She’s cute.”

For some reason, those two words stayed with me.

We were there because doctors were looking for abnormalities.

They were measuring her bones, studying growth charts, and discussing possible diseases.

But in that moment, the doctor did not talk about measurements or diagnoses.

He simply looked at our daughter and called her cute.

For those few seconds, she stopped feeling like “a baby who might have a disease.”

She was simply our daughter.

With every visit, we received more ultrasound pictures.

Her profile.

Her body.

Her arms and legs.

Her face.

I would take them home and look at them again and again.

I was scared.

But I also thought she was adorable.

I was anxious.

But I wanted to meet her.

Those feelings existed inside me at the same time, and I could not separate them.

After that first visit, all of my prenatal checkups were transferred to the large hospital.

Every two weeks, my husband drove us along the same long road.

At first, every family I saw in the hospital frightened me.

I felt as though I might be looking at our own future.

But as we returned again and again, the way I saw those families gradually began to change.

They were not simply “families with sick children.”

Every family had its own story.

Some laughed.

Some looked tired.

Some cried.

Some sat together in silence.

Whatever circumstances had brought them there, life was still continuing around them.

And slowly, a small thought began to form inside me.

Maybe whatever happens to us, we will find our own way to live too.

I was not strong enough to truly believe that yet.

But the thought had begun to exist.

As my stomach grew larger, the shape of my fear began to change.

At first, all I had wanted to know was,

What disease does she have?

But gradually, other questions became stronger.

What will she look like when she is born?

Will she be able to breathe on her own?

Will she be born safely?

And when I finally see her for the first time, what will I feel?

Time did not wait for my heart to catch up.

With every examination, the day we would meet her was getting closer.

There’s Something I’m a Little Concerned About.

🇯🇵 Read in Japanese

That day was supposed to be another ordinary prenatal checkup.

The drive to the clinic felt the same as always, and while I sat in the waiting room, waiting for my name to be called, I remember thinking only about the baby.

Would we be able to see her face today?

Would she be moving around?

Had she grown since the last appointment?

The ultrasound was always one of my favorite parts of pregnancy.

For a few minutes, I could see the baby who was always with me but still hidden inside my body, and even the smallest movement on the screen made me happy.

That day, too, I entered the examination room, lay back on the bed, lifted my shirt, and felt the cool gel spread over my stomach.

The familiar black-and-white image appeared on the screen.

At first, nothing seemed unusual to me.

Our baby was there, curled up inside me just as she had been at every other appointment, and the doctor began the examination in the usual way, measuring her head, her abdomen, and different parts of her body.

I watched the screen without thinking too much about the numbers.

I did not fully understand what each measurement meant, but I had grown used to trusting that if the doctor was quietly checking everything, then things were probably fine.

After a while, though, I noticed that the doctor was looking at the screen a little more carefully than usual.

He measured the same area again.

Then he changed the angle and measured it once more.

He drew a line across the image, checked the number, and moved to another part of the baby’s body.

The room gradually became quieter.

I started to feel uneasy.

I did not know exactly what he was looking at, but I could tell that something had caught his attention.

I wanted to ask,

“Is something wrong?”

But I could not bring myself to say it.

Part of me was afraid that the moment I asked the question, the answer would become real.

After a while, the doctor finally spoke.

“There’s something I’m a little concerned about.”

The moment I heard those words, the vague uneasiness I had been feeling suddenly became much clearer.

The doctor continued looking at the monitor as he explained.

“The bones in the arms and legs look a little shorter than expected.”

I stared at the screen.

To me, our baby looked the same as she always had.

I could not tell what was short.

I could not see what was different.

“What does it mean that the bones are short?” I asked.

The doctor explained that it did not immediately mean something was wrong, and that babies can grow at different rates.

There were still many things that could not be known from a routine ultrasound alone.

But because there was something he wanted to examine more carefully, he recommended that we have a more detailed 4D ultrasound.

“I think it would be better to take a closer look with a 4D ultrasound.”

A 4D ultrasound.

Until then, I had thought of 4D ultrasound as something exciting.

Something that let parents see their baby’s face more clearly and more three-dimensionally.

Would she look like me?

Would she look like my husband?

Would we finally get a better look at her face?

That was the kind of thing I had associated with 4D ultrasound.

I had never imagined that I would be having one because the doctor was concerned about something.

So I underwent the 4D ultrasound.

The baby’s body was examined more carefully.

The doctor looked at her from different angles and checked one area after another.

Her head.

Her body.

Her arms.

Her legs.

And especially the bones in her limbs.

Only a short while earlier, I had been thinking,

“I hope we can see her face.”

Now, there was only one thought in my mind.

Please let everything be okay.

The doctor carefully changed the angle again and again, looking closely at the baby’s arms and legs.

Each time he stayed quiet for too long, I felt my chest tighten.

Did he find something?

Are the bones really too short?

Is she okay?

I wanted to ask, but I was afraid to hear the answer.

Meanwhile, our baby moved on the screen as if nothing unusual were happening.

She moved her body normally, completely unaware of how frightened I had become.

Watching her move gave me a little comfort.

But as soon as the doctor began checking the bones again, the fear returned.

After the examination, the doctor explained the findings to us.

The long bones in the arms and legs were indeed a little shorter than expected.

There were also some concerns about the proportions of the bones in her limbs.

That was the first time I heard the term “long bones.”

The doctor explained that it was still too early to say exactly what it meant.

We would need to continue watching how she grew.

I nodded as he spoke.

But to be honest, very little of what he said stayed in my mind.

Only one thought remained.

Her bones are short.

Even after we left the clinic, those words stayed with me.

My husband seemed much calmer than I was.

I am sure he had his own worries, but at the time, I was too overwhelmed by my own fear to imagine what he might have been feeling.

How can you seem so normal?

I’m terrified.

Those were the thoughts running through my mind.

Even after we got home, I kept replaying the appointment.

The routine ultrasound.

The doctor saying that something looked a little unusual.

The 4D ultrasound.

And then, once again, the explanation that the bones in her arms and legs were shorter than expected.

Only a few hours earlier, it had been an ordinary prenatal checkup.

But by the end of that day, a kind of fear I had never known before had entered our pregnancy.

I placed my hand on my stomach.

The baby moved.

It was the same familiar movement I had felt many times before.

Whatever the doctor had said, our baby herself had not suddenly changed.

She was still there.

Still moving.

For a brief moment, that comforted me.

But the comfort did not last very long.

I picked up my phone.

I began typing the words I remembered into the search bar.

“Fetal arms and legs short.”

“Short long bones.”

“Pregnancy short bones disease.”

One unfamiliar condition appeared after another.

Genetic disorders.

Bone diseases.

Complications.

The future.

I thought that if I could understand what was happening, I would feel less afraid.

I thought that information would reassure me.

Instead, the more I searched, the more frightened I became.

Every new word led to another possibility.

Every possibility began to feel as though it could belong to our child.

Nothing had been diagnosed.

Nothing had been decided.

And yet, every result on the screen started to feel personal.

That night, I learned something for the first time.

Not knowing is frightening.

But trying to know can be frightening too.

From that day on, our pregnancy began to change little by little.

Until then, I had simply watched my stomach grow and looked forward to the day we would meet our baby.

Now, words like examinations, measurements, and bone length had entered our lives.

I did not know it yet, but there would be more detailed examinations ahead.

There would be unfamiliar medical names.

There would be fear.

There would be tears.

And even through all of that, my desire to meet this child would continue to grow stronger.