Over the next few posts I want to share our journey to diagnosis with our daughter. I’ve spoken to several parents who have been on this same journey and I thought it would be helpful to share the struggle we had and in some ways still have. We love our daughter and all her quirks as we love all our kids, my hope in sharing our journey is to offer hope to those in a similar situations.

Where do you start with a story like this? I’m going to take my cue for the first consultant we saw who understood, which took us 11 years to get, they want to start at pregnancy. Which felt like a long time ago, but as it’s where life begins, it’s where our story starts.

I fell pregnant shortly after surgery to remove my gall-bladder, when my eldest was just under a year old. I wasn’t fantastically healthy, even though I was slimmer than I’d been since I was a teenager! But we were super excited and keen to grow our family.

When I was at the beginning of the second trimester, my son got chicken pox and I got a mild case of shingles. Not ideal. We also had to move house when I was six months pregnant! Probably our worst ever house move!

After that though life was pretty straightforward, except that we had to get rid of our car. So when I went in to labour we had to wait for some friends to drive us to the hospital. Everyone assumed it would be another long labour but by the time I got to the hospital it was only 3 hours until she was born.

In comparison to my first that was fast! I think Sean was pretty traumatised by it and for weeks after he said he could still hear my screams! The midwife put in my notes that I was uncontrollable! Pretty funny now but not at the time!

Describing all that to a consultant 11 years later feels like a waste of time, but she added it to the notes. They need the full picture.

Next time I’ll write about those first few days. How all this starts with you questioning whether you’re just a bad mum who doesn’t know what she’s doing.