About twelve weeks after our first appointment with the OB, Hubby and I happily made the jaunt to the OB’s office…we were ready to see our baby!! We had been hearing good, strong heartbeats for two months already (I even gave the baby a pep talk before each appointment: “Come on, Baby. Make a big strong heartbeat for Momma”). Almost everything had been going great. There was that one tiny incident at around thirteen weeks…the one when I had a very mild bleeding episode and thought I might be losing the baby. The OB office calmed my fears, but this was a very harrowing experience for me. I have 7 siblings in heaven who never made it to earth, and I am keenly aware of the possibility that something doesn’t reconcile between my mom’s journey and my own “fertile Myrtle” experience. Nonetheless, I prayed and prayed for God to keep my baby healthy and bargained with Him about it, too.
Back to the ultrasound appointment. We were so excited to see our baby and find out which room would be the nursery (we have a blue and a green room and would choose which one to set up for baby based on gender…so old-fashioned in that way). I’ve never had an ultrasound before, so it didn’t even cross my mind that anything might be wrong when it went on a long time. Baby was playing a little hard to get, without many good pictures of some key elements. One key element he had no problem showing was that he was a HE. The goods were not in question. The U/S tech printed out a few pictures for us, and told us the OB would be in to the U/S room to speak to us, as she would want to see some things for herself. Great.
When the OB came in she told us about some concerning aspects of the ultrasound. She told us that our precious BOY had a choroid plexus cyst in his brain, and also an abnormally thick nuchal fold. She tried to quell our fears by saying that one or the other of these things might not give her too much pause, but in concert, she felt that I should have another U/S with the high-risk OB group in the area. Their equipment, she said, was first rate and they would be able to see and monitor better than she could. She also asked, since I was still a few days shy of 20 weeks, whether I would like to have the Quad screen now. She made a point of reminding me that I had declined it previously, as though having it at eight weeks would have somehow changed our current circumstance. I wanted to remind her that it was only a screening test which wouldn’t have told us much useful information at eight weeks, and still wouldn’t tell us much of anything. We still were not going to terminate. I decided to go ahead and have it, just in case it could somehow clarify anything when considered in combination with our U/S results. And so, the following week, we were off to the one place I did not want to go for anything related to our son: a high-risk OB office within the walls of the teaching hospital where I worked, and my husband still did.
No comments:
Post a Comment