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Tell me how old Sam is and who else is in your family? |
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Sam's 18 months old. Shannon, his older sister, she's 3½, there's Martin, his Dad who is 25 and I am his Mum, Nikki, and I'm 24. |
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When did you find out that Sam was going to be Down's? |
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We found out when I was 20 weeks pregnant. We got referred to the hospital after seeing that on the scan and at the RVI they detected his heart had problems as well. He had three holes in the heart and his pulmonary artery was very narrow so at that point they said he had a 1 in 3 chance of having downs syndrome, so we just prepared for that and read up on everything. |
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And what was your reaction? |
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Martin and I, as soon as we started thinking about having children, we thought that "our child is our child no matter what and we will love it for who it is, and who they are". So that's it, as soon as we found out, it had no effect really on our family status anyway; Sam was going to be Sam no matter what. |
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So you didn't have to make a decision? |
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No, we would never, ever abort a child for any reason and we are firm believers of it will happen for a reason. Sam's meant to be here for a reason as well as Shannon was meant to come first because she's such a lovely big sister, so that's it. |
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What were other people's reactions in your family? |
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Our family has the same kind of reaction as ourselves. I was brought up in a very open
minded family on other cultures and my Dad was in the army so we moved around quite a lot so we experienced all the cultures as well. And Martin's family - he comes from a family of 8 children with his Mum and Dad - a big Catholic family. Martin has a retina bastoma in his eye which is cancer and he had to have it taken out so within their family he's had disabilities and defects as well, so their family's used to that, so it was fine. We're very lucky that every single body is so supportive of us and of Sam. |
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What about the outside community? |
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We've had a mixture of experiences. There's been people want to either cuddle him, kiss him and hold him and just want to be around him all the time, or they just don't want to be near him at all. There's never an in between, they both like and love him or they just don't understand who he is at all. It's very strange because we have people saying 'oh, isn't he gorgeous, isn't he lovely' and we say 'oh he's got Down's Syndrome' and they just walk away, so all of a sudden he's not gorgeous or lovely and you just think, well why? They just don't understand. I think people need to be educated. |
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