to be honest, our experience was not that good
we were referred to hospital when on day 6 the midwife weighed him and said he'd lost over 10% of his body weight and we needed to go to intensive care
terrified we took him, and from the moment he was in there, he plummetted
he started projectile throwing up, his temp was freezing and we were told later his potassium level was past 11 (we were also told if ours got to 8 we'd be brown bread!)
that night we were called in to see a paed endo and he told us that it could be cah.
he also said that we should stop calling our baby a 'he' and stop using his name, because there was a chance it could be a girl
the next day we were told that this wasn't the case
two weeks later we were told it was
in the meantime we didn't tell any of the visitors who worriedly came in, not anyone from our traumatised families, it was truly hellish
when the chromosome tests came back and we were told she was a girl we were given the option to raise her as either sex, but we looked at it from the angle that God had intended a girl, but things had just got a little messed up because of the cah.
we then hd to tell everyone, but we kept the name Finley for her because we had chosen it for its meaning 'Fair Warrior' and she had proved her warrior spirit. we changed the spelling to Finleigh and added Lou as a middle name.
we still get asked about 'him' from different people, and although this was painful at 1st, we now accept that most of the time it is probably down to the fact that we kept a boys name, and nothing to do with the fact that they know she was our little boy for the first few weeks.
we went through with corrective surgery, but shewill also need a vaginoplasty soon (she's 18mths) becaue she does not have one. for us, the surgery seemed natural to make her life as straightforward as possible. denying her surgery didn't seem right for us.
however on a separate trip to the hospital when she was particularly ill, one doctor introduced herself and said 'i know about your little girl' which got our back up straight away because no one likes to think of their child as a talking point and discussion topic at a doctors conference, she then made a comment about how she agreed with us that we should NOT have surgery if she wasn't at any medical risk and leave it for her to decide when she was older.
not only had she got our decision wrong but this sent us into turmoil
were we really doing the right thing? had we been pushed into it? had we made a mistake?could we really leave a little girl to grow up with a penis? should we be raising her as a girl at all?
even today it bugs me, but we did what we thought was best and will love her through any situation in which she finds herself
me and my husband were promised all sorts of support and counselling and its never happened and i have so many questions about the condition, but we hardly ever see our consultant and when we do we have to deal with the important physical and medical aspects of the condition, not the mental/ psychological for her or us
