Definition of gutted

A very good friend of mine has been trying to get pregnant for some time now, so we were absolutely thrilled when she told us before Christmas that she was seven weeks gone and due in July ‘09.

We have all been holding our breath, waiting for the scan and the magic twelve weeks to come around, as she’s miscarried several times before so our celebrations were a bit muted. We all forgot why pregnant women get scanned at 12 weeks, only thinking what a lovely opportunity to get a first sight of the teeny baby, a new life waiting to make its presence felt, a promise of so much joy to come.

Of course, 12 week scans have nothing to do with happiness tourism, and everything to do with analysis of medical risk, as we have found out to our cost. She had her scan last week, and the results came back 1:5 chance of Downs and 1:2 chance of Edwards/Patau . . . we were all devastated, but clung onto the hope that it might be a misdiagnosis, and once she’d had the CVS tests it would all be OK.

Sadly, not. The test results have come back and confirmed that the baby has Edwards Syndrome.

It’s a total bastard of a genetic defect, so severe that only 95% of babies make it to term, of those, 50% die before they are 2 months old, only 5-10% of the remainder make it through their first year, and, of those, only 1% will survive beyond their 10th birthdays.

People say they are ‘gutted’ without really thinking what it means. Let me remind you. It means to disembowel, to destroy the interior of something, to remove all vital or essential parts.