Just a Copy of that One Tough Update

Hello all, Hopefully I will be able to do justice in this email to let you know what is happening and what we are currently facing. Thank you for the amazing phone calls, emails, and texts. For those of you that are truly supportive, we really appreciate it. Hopefully I won't get too mumbled in this email, since it is difficult, but we want all of you to know what we are truly going through. We did get to see our baby yesterday. 7.5 weeks old with a heartbeat, which was truly amazing. Then we had to go in for the most difficult, horrible news of our lives. I will start with the baby. There is a great chance this baby will not survive the pregnancy, a great chance. As the baby grows it will be trying to take from my reserves, that will get less and less as time goes on. If the baby does survive, it can be born very, very early causing great complications, be born with very major birth defects, or die at birth. So unfortunately there is no real life for the baby. Then there comes me. What most of you don't understand is that I have a very detailed heart condition, with 3 surgeries through my life to keep me alive. Due to all this I am compensating so much just in my own life that as I go on with the pregnancy my body will begin to try and compensate more. The risk with that is the amount of work that will put on my heart and the chance for heart failure is great. Every week I get more and more into the pregnancy the weaker I will become and the harder my heart will have to work. If I go full term with the baby then the actual birth will take a grave toll on me, which can actually cause damage to my heart, making my survival rate for me after that very slim. So basically if myself and the baby survive I may not get to the baby's 5th birthday, etc.... This is so hard. There is very, very serious risk. All the doctors know our moral and ethical beliefs and they will support this, but they flat out asked me that I understand that this can result in my and the baby's death. Our Cardiologist actually has the same beliefs as us and she even said that she is very torn because she is soooo worried about me. She actually used all her resources to call around and email the best Cardiologists in the world and got no other view. So now we get to the hard part. If we were completely honest with you we can say with no reservation that we wish we were not pregnant. We never knew the risks before. We sit here and know what great danger two lives are in right now. We know that with what we believe we cannot take our baby's life, but we also are sitting here knowing the baby will not have a life here, only with Jesus. We are asking Jesus to take the baby home. Not to make it easier, but selfishly so that we don't have to make a tough decision. I am sitting here feeling that if we do choose abortion that we will be greatly judged by our friends and family. We know deep in our hearts that God already knows what we are thinking. We know we are forgiven, even though we would have to live with that decision the rest of our lives and stand in front of God to account for it. But what is our choice? 1 life or 2? Seriously what would you do? What we don't want right now is judgement. What we want is support. Thank you to our families for their amazing support and prayers right now. We would love to hear your thoughts, your prayers, your feelings, etc. Everyone is BCC'd on this email, so you can just reply all to Matt and I so we can both read it. I don't think there was a way to create any shorter of an email, so thank you for reading. Love, Alli & Matt