I was 22 weeks pregnant when we saw the foetal medicine cardiac specialist; I could feel the baby moving. She scanned me for 45 minutes, saying nothing. Then she drew a diagram of the baby’s heart and, where the aorta should have been, she put a line through it.
That picture will stay with me for ever. She drew it beautifully, but I knew what it meant. Dorothy, our daughter, had an interruption of the aortic arch, no left ventricle and a massive hole in her heart. The most likely outcome was that she would be stillborn. If she was born, they would have to do open heart surgery within a week, and she would need more throughout her life.
