Yes, it is possible to get pregnant on birth control. This is the picture I texted to my boyfriend of one year. I had just relocated from Texas to New Mexico and had a doctor’s appointment where they told me I was eighteen weeks pregnant. I didn’t even have time to unpack my car before I decided I needed to turn around and move back to Texas to be with my boyfriend. We were about to have our own little family.

The pregnancy was moving along as expected and anticipation grew as my twenty-week ultrasound approached – will it be a boy or a girl?

This was the very first appointment that Karlie’s dad was able to attend, so I was already nervous contemplating how he would react to seeing our baby for the first time on the screen. There I was, anxious and fidgety, lying back on the paper covered chair with my shirt pulled all the way up while the sonographer spread warm jelly all over my belly with the transducer probe. I noticed that the technician spent an exceptional amount of time taking pictures of our baby’s heart. I knew right away that something was wrong and I felt like I was suddenly the only person in the room. Everyone seemed to disappear as I got lost in my own anxiety and thoughts of what could be happening in there with our unborn child. Karlie was of course stubborn even in utero and didn’t want to show us her lady parts at first so we left that room with the technician saying we should rely on the blood test but our baby is probably a girl.

The ultrasound took so long that it was already time for Karlie’s dad to go back to work. He gave me a long hug and I headed upstairs to my OBGYN appointment alone. I didn’t even bother mentioning to him that I thought something was wrong with our baby because I didn’t want him to think I was crazy and overacting. The ten minutes I spent in the exam room waiting on Dr. Nowitzki, my OBGYN at Corpus Christi Medical Center – Bay Area, felt like an eternity. I had so many negative things racing through my head that I was convinced our baby was probably going to be a stillborn or had some form of a birth defect that would affect her life forever.

Bad news – she did have a birth defect. Not only did I find out that she was our little baby girl that day, but Dr. Nowitzki informed me that our innocent unborn baby girl had a congenital heart defect and possibly a cleft lip or palate. After all the bad news, she gave me a hug and told me everything was going to be okay. Yet, I wasn’t too convinced when I saw she checked the little box that read high-risk pregnancy and referred me to a specialist to have a Fetal Echocardiography. I kept my cool until I got to my car where I proceeded to cry my eyes out while I called Karlie’s dad to share the news.

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Enjoy this little slideshow of our birth announcement. Stay tuned and follow us at www.karliekateandme.com to see what the specialists told us!