Going Rogue: An American Life (50 page)

At the health conference, I spotted CBJ and smiled at her when I slipped her a note on the way ro the

I wrote:
I need to come

see you!

At about twelve weeks along, I visited CBJ at her Wasilla family practice. After the

we sat down together in her office

decorated with Alaska quilts, some of which she sews herself and gives ro babies she delivers, like the Noah:s Ark-themed blanket she’d sewn for Piper years earlier. She looked at me kindly.

“Well, you’re forty-three, so there’s a higher chance of certain abnormalities.” Then she showed me some statistics, one of which said I had about a one-in-eighty chance of having a child with Down syndrome.

“We discussed all this when you had Piper, and I remember you said abortion wasn’t going to be an option, so I just want you ro keep in mind that thete is some chance everything isn’t going ro be as easy at perfect as your other pregnancies.” I wasn’t worried. I was healthy as a hotse with four perfectly
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Going Rogue

healthy childten. Besides, my sistet Heathet already had a special needs son, Karchet, who had autism. He was Out family’s angel boy. In Out family, we always said God knew what he was doing when he gave Heathet, the most nutturing of the Heath sisters, the child with special needs. Among all of us, she was the one with the tender spirit who could not only handle’ but even
thrive
with a child with And in fact she had chosen working with

special needs children in public schools as her profession. eBJ said she’d like me to have a sonogram,. so I walked into the office across the hall. The techniCian was a sweet, funny older lady who’d been doing the procedure for decades. She prepped me, and we joked about a lot of things while she pressed the wand across my belly. Then she got a little quieter. Suddenly I flashed back to the gtim sonogram 1’d had when that first stoic doctor said, “There’s nothing alive in there.” Now my breath waiting.

Then the technician smiled. “I see boy parts. , . would that be good?”

Relief blew

me like the Mat-Su Valley wind. “Yes, that

would be perfect!”
God is so good!
I thought,
He knows what’s best.
She kept passing the transducet across my abdomen, more slowly

It seemed to be taking a long time. “Oops, sorry. Not sure on the boy parts after all. Yout baby might be a girl.” By then she was taking so long that I didn’t cate whether it was a boy or a girl. A healthy fourth daughter would be great. Yep, just fine. Please tell me all is fine.

Then the technician said, “The baby’s neck is a little bit thicker than what we would normally see …”

My first thought was,
Twelve weeks along and you can already
the baby’s neck? Amazing!
Then, a bit mote somberly, I remem6ered that somewhere along the line I had heard that that was a sign of Down syndrome. A whisper of fear tugged at my

SARAH

PALIN

heart, but I brushed it away with a thought:
God would never give
me anything I can’t handle. And I don’t think I could handle that.
God knew me: I was busy. Got to go-go-go. I’d always yapped about how lucky I was that my kids were all healthy overachievers, self-sufficient. Now, I thought, I’ve got a tough job and other kids who need me. I just couldn’t imagine how I could add a baby with special needs and make it all work.

Unless He knows me better than I know myself,
I thought a bit dismissively,
God won’t give me a special needs child.
CBJ called me the next day. Combined with my age, she said, the
sonogram pictures meant there was now a one-in-twelve chance
the baby had Down syndrome So? I thought.
That still means about a
90
percent chance that
everything’s fine.

“There’s a doctor in Anchorage I want you to go see, a geneticist,” she added. “I’m also offering you an amniocentesis”-the common prenatal test for genetic abnormalities.

I had always flippantly declined the amnios before, thinking they didn’t matter, since I confidently asserted I would never abort anyway. But this time I said yes. This time I wanted information. If there was something wrong, I wanted to be prepared. Todd ‘was out of town on the day of the appointment, so I visited the geneticist alone-through a back door, under my maiden name. I felt a bit of fear. Three days later, I was in my Anchorage office when CBJ called. I thought it was strange she would give me the results. I could have sworn that the nurse said
she’d
be calling. I still remember what time it was: 2:22 p.m.

“I have the amnio results,” she said. “I think you should come to my office in Wasilla. Can you come now?”

“No, no, just give me the results over the phone,” I said, in-

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