I'm Up, No, I'm Down, No, I'm Fine, No, it Was A Bird, No, A Plane, No, Just Wait....

I don't even know where to begin this post and I don't even know what is up with this pregnancy yet but things are looking better than a week ago. Where to start?

Last Friday, the ultrasound technician carefully took me through everything (see, there's the feet, there's the diameter of the skull, there's the tooth buds...) and then at the very end everything fell apart. The 4-chamber view of the heart looked fine but then they need to locate the outflow tracts from the heart (the vessels that will eventually route the blood correctly through the heart). The technician couldn't find the vessels and then when she thought she saw them, they didn't appear to cross as they should (which is a MAJOR problem).

The big guns where brought in (the Perinatologist) who spent forever trying to find the outflow tracts and then pronounced "they should be right here and they aren't, we'll have to refer you to the cardiac specialists, when did you have your amnio?". She told me that the outflow tracts are very nearly ALWAYS found in normal pregnancies and the failure to visualize them was NOT a good sign (to put it mildly).

Fast forward to my OB who concurred and said that she had only had failure to find the outflow tracts in very obese patients (which I am not). We didn't even bother making another OB appointment as everyone had started to write this pregnancy off. So we decided to arrange an urgent amnio for yesterday (once they establish congenital heart defects, they always highly recommend and amnio to check for other possible complications which might arise).

So there I am yesterday, after having spent half an hour discussing my situation and filling out consent forms. I am lying on the bed, ultrasound gel on the stomach. I've been shown my name on the testtubes for collection of the amniotic fluid and the perinatologist is having her final sip of coffee prior to the amnio draw. Then....then... the ultrasound technician (different one than last time) says "why are you here again?". When I explained about the outflow tracts she raised her eyebrows and said "let me check again". And... she found them, exactly where they are supposed to be and in the correct orientation (or at least apparently).

There followed some discussion of what this all might mean and I had about 2 minutes to decide whether to proceed with the amnio or not. I didn't have it done.

So, I still don't know what our odds look like but I will know more early next week after the diagnostics with the cardiac specialists.

This has shaken me up so much (good for a martini, not for a person). I spent six days saying goodbye to this baby. And as this one is so active, it was impossible to forget for much more than a minute at a time. I spent the time weighing choices like "is it better to terminate when the baby is still in utero or should I go to term and then watch it struggle to breath and then suffer heart failure within minutes of being born?" It made me think about the responsibility I have to this baby and what life means and where the quality of life fits into the equation.

Oh yes, it's been nothing but good times over here. The one thing this has done is to make me much less sorry for myself over the five miscarriages. Really. Compared to losing this baby now, the miscarriages would seem like only a small bump in the road. And I know that there are experiences that would make losing this baby seem like less of a tragedy than what I currently feel. I just hope I never have to learn that lesson.

DinoD