My child hasn’t been born yet, but I already know that I’m going to be a terrible parent. The worst. I’m going to be fussy and overattentive. I’m going to micromanage the hell out of everything it ever does. I’m going to live in a constant state of panic. There’s a pretty good chance that I’m going to name it after Noel Edmonds, too. My child is bound to hate me for all this but, to be frank, it’s probably got it coming.

We’ve already come quite close to losing our baby and the thought of going through anything like that again has already sent me into a death-spiral of emotional suffocation that won’t let up until it moves out. Having kids, I’m starting to discover, is going to be a right pain in the arse.

With the benefit of hindsight, our troubles seem quite small – during the routine 12-week pregnancy scan, my girlfriend and I were informed that our baby had a 1 in 22 chance of developing a chromosomal abnormality.

This meant our baby had a relatively high probability of being born with Down’s syndrome – which would be upsetting but not necessarily the end of the world – or Edward’s syndrome, where the baby would be lucky to make it to its first birthday.

This, obviously, was much harder to deal with.

Even when things are ostensibly going well, being a dad-to-be can feel like an extended exercise in abject helplessness. Your partner is the one going through these incredible biological changes. She’s the one connected to the child. She’s the one changing shape and getting headaches and feeling nauseous. She’s the one who’s developed the ability to smell every bin within a six-mile radius. Meanwhile, you’re left on the periphery, unsure of what to do. The NHS offers weekly emails that track the development of your baby and offer advice to new fathers. They don’t help.

The emails mothers get are amazing – they tell you what to eat and how you’ll feel and the best way to cope with this sudden surge of hormones without feeling too dehumanised by it. Dads don’t get that. Dads get emails that say things like, “How about you clean out the cat litter this week?”, and, “Hey, have you thought about washing up once in a while, you inconsiderate bellpiece?” One of them told me to go for a run. I think this was just to get me out of the house.

But when things start to go wrong, you feel doubly helpless. There’s nothing you can do to help your baby and – aside from offering lots of hand-holding and empty reassurances – there’s nothing you can really do to help your partner. You feel horrible, but it’s no commiseration to know that everyone else is feeling much worse.

I appear to have committed every single detail of the scan to memory, as part of a subconscious attempt to parse the day for clues. When did the doctors know something was wrong? When they kept asking us about my girlfriend’s age? When they repeatedly quizzed us about IVF, despite our protestations that we conceived naturally? When their voices dropped to a whisper, and all I could pick out was the sound of the older one telling the younger one that “It’s OK to be nervous”?

Either way, we were oblivious as we sat in the waiting room afterwards, arguing about who the foetus most looked like. Then we were called back, and two new doctors calmly but quickly explained our one-in-22 risk. The best way to know for sure what chance our baby had, we were told, was to have a CVS; an invasive test that takes material from the placenta. It would bring a definitive result, but it increased the likelihood of miscarriage. We agreed that we’d rather know, and almost immediately my girlfriend was lying on a bed and crying in agony because a huge syringe had been plunged through her stomach into her womb. I was genuinely awed by how brave she was during this emotional and physical assault, but it was easily the most powerless I’ve ever felt. My job is to protect her from things like this, and there was nothing I could do.

The week spent waiting for the results was one of the longest of my life. Even before any of this happened, the pregnancy had reduced me to a bit of a mess. I was already frightened, but of things that would happen far into the future. How we’d be able to afford the baby. How small our flat was. How it’d affect my job. How it’d grow up to be a stroppy teenager. How one day it’d reach adulthood, move out and leave us alone and purposeless. How it might make me watch Frozen every day. That sort of thing.

But this was an immediate life-or-death situation. We both sat at home crying, taking it in turns to reassure each other that it’d probably be OK, but secretly aware that we’d have to consider having some horrible conversations. About whether we were capable of raising a disabled child, and its quality of life, and maybe even the possibility of terminating this little abstract we’d just seen kicking around delightedly on the ultrasound together. We hadn’t even met, but we’d both fallen hopelessly in love with it. We’d made it together and the thought of anything happening to it was agonising.

Over the next few days, we both developed our own ways of dealing with the horrible anticipation. My girlfriend, being a demonstrative Latin type, found solace in crying and shouting at people on public transport. I, meanwhile, reverted to painfully repressed type and bundled all my feelings down into the pit of my stomach until I basically lost my mind. This tends to happen when I’m under any sort of emotional strain – my attention to detail vanishes completely. So I tried to book cinema tickets to take our mind off things, but ended up getting the date wrong and arriving a day early. Two days in a row, I absentmindedly boarded a train going in the opposite direction of my destination. I lost track of the time and even the day. By trying to keep it together for the sake of my prospective family, I fell apart.

The thing we both wanted to do more than anything else during this time was to read as much as we could about it. However, the most sensible advice I found on a pregnancy forum was “don’t read the forums”. Although at first it might be heartening to know that you’re not the first person to ever go through something like this, you quickly learn that reading about other people’s experiences won’t change your own. You could read three stories in a row about a couple with worse odds than yours who gave birth to a healthy baby, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll happen to you. It’s a crapshoot. To think otherwise would be foolish.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuart and Robyn. ‘My job is to protect her.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

But still, I needed something to cling on to. And this is how Noel Edmonds ended up becoming my unwitting spirit guide. A one in 22 chance of something going wrong is much more scary than a one in 200 chance. But it’s still one in 22, and they’re not bad odds. I realised that there are 22 boxes in a game of Deal or No Deal, and nobody ever wins Deal or No Deal. The entire show revolves around the idea that one in 22 is a ridiculously long shot. If it wasn’t, then everyone would win the top prize and they’d be out of business within a week. In my darkest hour I found genuine solace in the fact that a one-in-22 shot was enough to keep Noel Edmonds in gainful employment for almost a decade. I tried to convince myself that we stood a pretty good chance.

Still, it was hard. We were exhausted from worry. The tiredness crept into our bones. We’d talk more or less exclusively in heavy exhalations and fall asleep at weird hours. By the time the results came, along with the news that our child didn’t have any chromosomal deficiencies, we were too done in to be properly relieved. We were numb from anticipating the worst. Real life is only just starting to creep back in now, but the whole thing winded us both more than we’d ever care to admit.

We’re not out of the woods yet. There are more scans to come, which could offer their own nasty surprises. Accidents could happen. And then, even if we make it all the way through the pregnancy, our baby is going to be born into a world full of dangerous things; sharp things and hot things and heavy things and fast things that all exist purely to give me the jitters. But we’ll worry about all that when we need to.

I’m writing this now on the basis that, once it’s been born, my child will serendipitously find this piece online somewhere and read it. If that’s the case, I’m sorry I’ve been such a panicky dad. I hope now you realise why. Also, while I’m here, I also hope you realise why we named you Noel. I haven’t told your mother that we’re doing this yet, even if you turn out to be a girl, but I’m sure she’ll be cool with it.