Well, curently here, the latest numbers say that a person with no family history has a 1 in 200 chance of getting it. So, with no inherited genetic factor, you could sceen all you want... you still wouldn't/couldn't guarantee a child won't get IBD. I dont' know how the folks with zero history of this disease get it... gene mutation?
Divine intervention? The rhyme, reason, wellll, there are just something outside of our ken. Now, this is going to sound heartless, and it's a point that I for one just shudder at... but there are only two things I have guareenteed my children by bringing them into this world. The 'chance' of life, and.. inevitably.. their 'death'. Living ones life, or ones' childrens life, by what we 'predict', well, I repeat... its' faulty logic. I'm going to go into a long winded story, longer than even my usual... cause I think this is tooo important a topic of discussion. I'm not trying to ram my beliefs down the throats of others.. to each their own, but I have had experiences in my life that... have given me a different perspective. And unless someone has had a similar experience, you just can't feel it really.
My oldest son was a planned pregnancy. And, an idylic one. Literally. 2 weeks before his 'due' date, his mom went into labour, we rushed to the hospital, but after hours it was determined to be 'false labour'.. Two weeks later, again we headed to the hospital .. right on schedule. After 36 hours of very hard labour, docs had to perform a C-section.. placenta had displaced, blocke the canal. it was touch N go... mother nearly died.. my son started his life in a coma. lack of oxygen, mercurium... rushed to a neo natal intensive care facilty 30 miles from where we lived. apparently, it wasn't false labour 2 weeks before. the timing from the ultra sounds was off by 2 weeks... and in those next two weeks he'd slowly weakened.. hard labour did the rest. by the midway mark of his 3rd day in hospital... butterfly IV's all over his body.. in an incubator.. head shaved, the alarms going off every few minutes when his heart or breathing stopped (I was by his side for most of it.. shuttling back n forth between the 2 hospitals). Well it isn't for the faint of heart to become a parent, cause no one prepare you for this. The director of the NICU laid it out for me.. he was rated a 3 out of 10. His organs were shutting down... his kidneys had just stopped.. and if anything else stopped, the only two recourses were to stop oxygen, turn off the alarms, let him go OR air evac him to Halifax, put him on a list for a kidney transplant..
hope things turned around. Even in that event, the odds against him were sky high.. she advised that it would be wise to start making arrangements, see the local funeral director,, just in case there weren't any miracles. I left there, drove the 30 miles (to this day I don't recall 1 second of that drive) stopped in to see my folks... have a man to man talk with my father.. which actually ended up me bawling like a baby... and getting his offer of meeting with undertakers.
Then I drove to the hospital where my wife was. That trip I remember as I was frantically trying to come up with a plausible story that I could fabricate so that I didn't have to tell her the truth... she wasn't completely out of the woods yet herself.. and I didn't know what the shock of the truth would do to her health.
I needn't have bothered... I'm not a very good liar. No poker face. She knew I was keeping his extremely seriois condition from her, and her aunt worked as a nurse in the hospital where the NICU was.. so in the midst of my journey, she'd called... and had been told chapter N verse. How hopeless it all really was. He really wasn't supposed to last the afternoon.. Instead of folding, she asked her aunt to perform an emergency baptism.. which her aunt did. Snuck into the NICU, went to his incubator, blessed N named him. Within 30 minutes, a miracle. No ****! No hype! He did a complete 180. Literally gained ground by the minute. Now, at my lowest points, I told the docs I didn't care if he had an IQ of 40, if I had to wait on him hand N foot, as long as they kept him alive. It was a moot point. His life was out of their control.. I made the same bargain with God. You folks have no idea how hard N often I prayed. I dunno if they was 'divine intervention', whether it was sheer luck or pre-ordained destiny. I just know my son is alive, and well.. intelligent, handsome, healthy, a musical prodigy... and I've come as close as any parent can to having lost a child w/o actually losing one... And I wouldn't want to go any closer. So, to me, thanks to this.. and other incidents along the way.. I can only repeat that none of us have guarantees, we can't pass them along to our kids, we can't demand any up front before we have kids... and to think we can means we are only fooling ourselves. Life is just too prescious, IT deserves every chance we can give it..
OK, jumping down off the pulpit now.
