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.