Jeni and her husband had already put together their baby nursery and drafted a list of names when she learned the baby she had been carrying for 33 weeks had a brain that had not developed properly.
A year later, Christina and her husband faced a similar diagnosis for their child at 28 weeks of gestation: excess fluid had built up in the skull, preventing the brain from growing correctly.
The two California women, both in their mid-30s, didn’t know each other but faced the same agonizing days between initial diagnosis and final confirmation of what’s called ventriculomegaly. Though no doctor could tell them exactly what their child might endure, they faced a spectrum of scenarios: death in utero, developmental delays, a short, seizure-filled life in the neonatal ICU.
