Believe it or not I was very excited after I peed on a stick! On December 11, 2011, I peed on a pregnancy stick and it was positive. We were going to have a baby! It was really hard not to tell people right away. So hard in fact that I did tell my two best friends a couple of weeks later. Here ends the rosy pink part of the story. It all went spectacularly to pieces after that. This may be an exaggeration, we're looking into it.Over Christmas break I woke up with something strange happening in my right eye. Turns out that the blind spot is affectionately know by ophthalmologists as cotton wool spots in people generally 20 years my senior. Most likely a clot from somewhere else in my body traveled to my eye and clogged up the works in a fairly large portion of my retina tissue. Pregnancy can be a cause of cotton wool spots, though usually concurrently with gestational diabetes and high blood pressure. I did not (and do not) suffer from either of those symptoms. I was tested for a whole range of things, which all turned out fine. So we were confident that a pregnancy fluke caused the blind spot. But would they leave well enough alone? Of course not. This time I had to go in for an echocardiogram and a carotid doppler, AKA ultrasounds of my heart and neck arteries. When the echo was inconclusive (ugh) I went back for another echo but this time with the added bonus of some shaken saline solution, an IV, and lots of stress. Their suspicions were confirmed- I have a tiny hole in the septum of my heart that is obvious when I "bear down" and not so present when I breathe normally. Perinatalogist here we come! The perinatalogist may say I am fine and just to push when the time comes and stop being a baby. (really, it isn't me, mam.) They may say, "stop! don't push. Let's cut you open and yank the baby out through your tummy instead." Or they may say, "keep coming to see us and we'll see." Which would you choose?
Thrown in the mix of all of this roller coaster ride was the fact that I turned 35 years old 1.5 months after peeing on the stick. Suddenly I got pushed into the high(er) risk category and subjected to more tests. The first trimester screening left us with the same risk as a 45 year old woman or in other words, 1 in 21 chance of having a baby with down syndrome. The NF was 3.2 mm; anything under 3.0 is considered normal. All my proteins came back fine, though. So more to worry about.
The 20 week ultrasound happened after it felt like an eternity. and (drum roll), they found no markers for down syndrome. Are you excited? Well, don't be. It doesn't change our risk and the baby still has a 50% chance of popping out with a disability. I am fighting off feeling completely happy that the baby appears normal. I don't want to come crashing down off a high on D-day or in two weeks at the fetal echo. What is a fetal echo you ask? Due to the first trimester screening we also have to have an ultrasound done of the baby's heart. 20 weeks is too early so back we go. Babies with down syndrome tend to have heart issues, too, which is why they check for that as well.
There is just too much power, technology and knowledge these days. If I had known better or trusted my instinct that it would be better to not know until D-day, we would have passed on the screening. If we had just gone in today for the 20 week ultrasound we'd be sitting pretty. Because the thing is this, we still don't know jack. We won't do an amniocentesis so we won't know jack until D-day. Even if we did know for sure, we couldn't really prepare for it. We can't really prepare for anything anyway.
Denial is our best medicine right now, as long as we don't forget that even good news isn't really good news. And Jack is starting to sound like a decent name for a boy.
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