A North Carolina mom couldn’t explain the “feeling” she had throughout her pregnancy.
Despite repeated assurances that her pregnancy was completely healthy, Serena Murison had a strong intuition that her unborn baby would never be able to walk.
The 34-year-old said News week that her pregnancy with her son Rudy was completely normal.
“There were no red flags, nothing abnormal on the ultrasounds, nothing that anyone could point to medically,” Murison said. “I just had this deep, lingering knowledge that something was different. I couldn’t explain it, and honestly, I had no evidence to support it. I just knew it.”
Murison desperately wanted to believe what the doctors were telling him. She even took an NIPT test – a blood screening test that checks for certain chromosomal conditions – which showed no problems.
She also said others dismissed her concerns as pregnancy anxiety, but she was convinced her son would not walk.
“Everything objectively said I was carrying a healthy baby, so I tried to convince myself that what I was feeling was just anxiety,” Murison said. “But that feeling never really went away.”
Still, she couldn’t ignore a nagging feeling inside that made her believe there was more than what the doctors could see.
Rudy was ultimately diagnosed with LAMA2-related congenital muscular dystrophy, a rare neuromuscular disease that can lead to severe muscle weakness and developmental delays beginning in early childhood.
A 2023 study of people living with the disease published in Neurology: Genetics found that functions related to standing and walking were among the most severely affected abilities.
A 2024 Swiss cohort study also found that many people with the severe congenital form never managed to walk independently.
Researchers say the disease exists on a broad spectrum, with symptoms and outcomes varying greatly from patient to patient.
“It finally gave us an explanation as to why his body was working differently and why he wasn’t walking independently,” Murison said. “Getting that response was devastating, but it also put a name to something I had felt long before I knew it.”
Looking back, Murison said there’s a difference between blindly trusting a mother’s instinct and taking it seriously.
“I don’t think I had the magical ability to diagnose my child before he was born,” she said. “I couldn’t have known he had muscular dystrophy, but I knew my baby and something in me was paying attention before I had the language or evidence to explain why.”
For other parents who have concerns about their unborn baby that they struggle to explain, Murison would advise them to speak up, even if they don’t yet have evidence to back them up.
“Ask the question; stay alert,” she said. “You can trust what you notice without needing to know exactly what it means.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Emma Lee-Sang
Gn Health
