The Power Of One

When AMIE ROHAN discovered she was pregnant with twin girls, it was the startof an incredibly bittersweet journey,she recounts.

- Rachelle Unreich

I found out I was pregnant at three and a half weeks, less than a year after I got married. I started dry-retching when I was brushing my teeth and I thought, This is weird. A pregnancy test showed positive, and three weeks later I got a scan and found out we were having twins. I nearly fainted! I thought my husband [Sydney Swans player Gary Rohan] was playing a practical joke on me. When we had our 12-week scan, we found out that one of our girls, Willow, had anencephaly, which meant that she would be born without parts of her brain and skull — a condition we were told “was not compatible with life”. I had never even heard of it. I looked at Gary and said, “What the hell does that mean?” And then I asked my doctor, “Why? I’ve been taking folic acid for months!” He said, “Amie, sometimes we don’t know why.”

At first, we just felt really sorry for ourselves. I couldn’t relate my situation to anyone else I knew. And we also had to make a decision: we could abort the pregnancy if we wanted to, but I couldn’t do that, not after seeing those little babies on the scan with their hearts beating. We sat down and said, “This journey has been written for us. Let’s continue on it.” We decided to carry both babies to term, knowing that the twin with anencephaly wouldn’t live very long after birth. And although I don’t judge anyone who would make a different decision, I’m so glad I made the one I did. I can’t imagine not having met her.