If the doctors are right my son will be born next week. The surgical procedure they performed on my girlfriend, called a cerclage, has almost entirely failed.
A cerclage is a stitch, or clamp, placed in or around around a woman’s cervix, it’s meant to prevent a miscarriage due to an incompetent cervix. Ideally it would have lasted until our son’s natural due date of January 10, 2010. But no one really believed we’d get there. The idea has been to get to the mystical twenty-sixth week, when the boys’ lungs will have developed enough so he can survive outside the womb.
He made it to the twenty-sixth week marker six days ago. On Tuesday, during our regular hospital visit at the Ottawa General, the doctors told us the cerclage had slipped from 13mm to six. If you point your fingers downwards, and squeeze them together, that would be the cervix… the cerclage should be located between the top and middle knuckles. 13mm would be between the top of your fingernail, and the bottom knuckle.
The cerclage inside my girlfriend, which is the only thing holding our baby inside her womb, is now located about halfway between the end of your finger and the top of your fingernail.
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