I was 32 weeks pregnant and got in a little fender bender, and my doctor said let’s do an ultrasound. We went in for this ultrasound and discovered that Owen had PKD.

We really ran the gamut after that of crying and being scared and not knowing what was going to happen, trying to figure out how much information to share with our family and friends and how to share that information.

My mom knew that we had the ultrasound that day.  She is a worrier, and I knew that she would worry if we did not call right away, but we waited just a day with my parents, because I knew that she needed to know something.  So, we were really pretty straightforward with them, and we tried to use some of the same language that our doctor had given us about not going and looking things up, that it would be best to get our information straight from our doctors to start out so that we could understand everything fully, but telling people was really difficult, because it made it more real.

It was summer, and so I was not at school, and I was able to kind of just sit with it and not have to see people or talk about it yet, but because we don’t have family right here, we did have to do all of that over the phone, and that was really hard, and then we had friends texting, “How are you? How’s the baby? How’s everything?” and that was hard, because I felt like I had to lie to people for a little while and just say, “Everything’s good, bedrest is terrible, but everything is fine,” and leave it at that.  So, that was a really—we were sort of isolated for a while there, and that was really tough as well.