Picture-Perfect Just The Way She Is

Sheryl Bishop spent her whole pregnancy terrified something was seriously wrong with her daughter.

- Kara O'Neill

As Sheryl Bishop watches her daughter, Cora, eight, pose for the camera, she can’t help but echo her grin. ‘She’s such a natural, turning this way and that!’ Sheryl laughs. ‘She tells me she wants to be a full-time model when she grows up.’

When Sheryl and her partner, Daniel, found out they were expecting Cora in June 2010, they’d been together just five months. But while the news came as a bit of a shock, the couple was excited to meet the new member of their family.

At the 12-week scan everything was perfect – and, in a state of euphoria, Daniel and Sheryl got engaged, marrying a couple of months later in November 2010. After a short honeymoon, it was time for the 20-week scan, which meant finding out the sex of the baby.

‘Daniel and I agreed that as long as the baby was healthy, we didn’t care,’ Sheryl says. ‘But, deep down, I was desperately hoping for a daughter. A little girl I could play dress-up with and take shopping.’

Only, as Sheryl lay on the hospital bed, she saw the sonographer’s face stiffen. Something was wrong. Sheryl and Daniel were told their baby was missing the corpus callosum, a band of nerves that links the left side of the brain to the right. It meant the baby might suffer from seizures, as well as any number of developmental problems.

‘It was only when Daniel and I arrived home later that day that I realized in all the commotion we’d completely forgotten to ask if we were having a boy or a girl,’ Sheryl says.

In the following weeks, after more examinations, the bad news kept coming.

‘We found out that our baby was a girl, but all my fantasies of doing mum-and-daughter things together had vanished completely, to be replaced with constant worry instead.’