Graf#10

When I was in school I did plenty of research for different home work assignments. Most, if not all the research came from the old, ratty stack of Encyclopedias on a shelf in the school library. The internet was in its infancy and only available on three computers for a school of over four-hundred students…and I didn’t get much time with it back then. My first real deal with internet research came only about a year and a half ago when my wife had a routine test done during her pregnancy. This was the test for down syndrome, a simple blood drawing. They also check for several other defects, mostly chromosome related. Our test results were every expecting parent’s worst nightmare. The baby tested positive for something called trisomy 18, a chromosome defect. This trisomy 18 didn’t sound good at all coming from the doctor but most of it was all greek to us, so I decided to do some digging of my own on this unfamiliar topic. What I found terrified me, horrible birth defects if the baby even survived the pregnancy. In most cases the fetus doesn’t make it full term but in the rare occurrence that it does it will have little chance, if any of surviving outside the womb. The oldest living person with this defect only lived to age four. Then I started looking at the testing methods and results but things just didn’t add up, the numbers didn’t go together at all. These are the actual figures I found. 1 out of 24 pregnancies tests positive for trisomy 18 but only 1 out of 10,000 babies born actually has it. Take into the account all the ones that don’t make it and still, nothing adds up. We took our chances and said to hell with the doctors and all the bogus tests. Today we have a beautiful, healthy and happy, ten month old boy.