Share a time where you danced with uncertainty...and won. A story where you felt the butterflies, the anxiety and fear, where you thought about turning back, maybe you even did, but then turned back around and ended up creating or becoming or doing something amazing. It could be about art, business, love, health, life, whatever. It just has to be real, no fables here.

I’ve never done anything this dramatic and certainly not heroic. I’ve lived a pretty low-key life. But a time of great uncertainty and fear came when I was pregnant 24 years ago with my oldest daughter, Michelle.

When I was close to being five months pregnant, I went to a doctor appointment for one of my regular check-ups and blood was taken for an alpha-fetoprotein test (I’ll never forget that name).  A day later I got a phone call and the nurse asked if my husband and I could come in to discuss my test results with the doctor. Dr. Wasserwald was an older, kindly man—a very caring doctor. As gently as possible, he told us that my test results showed a level of alpha-fetoprotein that was very low, and this could indicate the possibility of Downs Syndrome. Those were scary words to hear, but his gentle and honest way of delivering them helped to calm our fears.

The doctor proceeded to conduct a short interview about our family history. Rich’s parents had an infant son who died as a baby. They rarely talked about him; just the mention of his name brought tears to their eyes. Rich and his brother quickly learned not to ask any questions and to avoid the subject. We didn’t have a clue about how or why the baby had died. When we explained this to Dr. Wasserwald, we could tell it added to his consternation. He scheduled an amniocentesis in order to determine if our baby had the extra Downs chromosome. He explained that it would take a week and a half to receive the amnio results, and Rich and I needed to discuss our options. If the baby did have Downs and we decided to have an abortion, it would have to be done quickly because I was getting too far along in my pregnancy. The alarm bells were starting to ring now, loud and clear.

Rich and I were on painful opposite sides of the fence. He said he absolutely would not be able to take it when people looked at our Downs Syndrome child with pity in their eyes.  If the baby had Downs, he wanted an abortion. I had a couple of school friends whose siblings had Downs, and I knew them to be sweet, loving children. I questioned how we could possibly abort just because our baby didn't meet some arbitrary standard of being "perfect." We simply could not reach an agreement about what to do.

That week and a half of waiting for the amnio results crawled by interminably slowly and I could hardly sleep or eat. If I aborted our baby, how could I live with myself? If I had the baby, would Rich  walk away from us? And if he did, could I handle being a single mother to a disabled child?

I finally received that dreaded phone call one afternoon at work. Tears of relief ran down my face as I was told we had a healthy, normal baby. We had indicated we wanted to know the sex, and our baby was a girl. So as it turned out, I didn’t have to make what would have been one of the hardest choices of my life. As we rode that roller coaster of emotions, we didn’t have the option of turning back. We simply held on with white knuckles, finished out the ride, and in the end we created an amazing baby girl. Had the results been different, I know that our baby girl would have been just as amazing, but our lives would definitely have been altered forever.