It's a.....BOY

Sorry to wait so long between posts! May is a busy time for me at work and I didn't have much spare time at work or at home!

We had our 20 week ultrasound on June 4th with a specialist. The day started out pretty crappy. I had scheduled our appointment 8 weeks prior. I had it listed as 11:30a.m. in my phone. J and I were up and ready to go pretty early and were just waiting to leave. At about 10:20, right before we were planning on leaving, I received a phone call from my regular OB's office. They said that we no showed on our ultrasound and wanted to know what was going on. I explained that our appointment was at 11:30 and we weren't late. So I ended up having to call the specialist and we argued for a few minutes about the time. Finally I said "there's no way I would deliberately miss this appointment. At this point it doesn't matter what time it was supposed to be, we need to know if we can be seen." They said if we could get there right away they would try to fit us in. We live like 45 minutes away so we rushed out the door and made it in about 30 minutes. Yeah, we might have sped a bit!!

Once we arrived they got us right in. At that point J and I were cranky, I was crying and we were so stressed. So to begin with this experience wasn't quite what I would have chosen for us!

Right away the Dr. said he saw the HB and my anxiety dropped a few notches. We found out we lost Bear at our anatomy ultrasound and I think we were both expecting bad news. I just knew that things were going to be bad and we were going to go home sad. But, I was wrong. The baby's heart was still beating. The Dr. also said right away he didn't see boy parts. He ended up being wrong though I guess. He said the baby was in a really bad position. He was breech, and he was squished up against my placenta (which is still in the wrong place) and uterus and it was hard to get a good angle. So ultimately he decided he thought he saw a scrotum and a penis. So we are going for boy at this point!

Of course, nothing can just be all good. I so wanted 100% good news with no worries. I didn't get it. I still have placenta previa where my placenta is completely covering my cervix. It hasn't moved at all since week 12 and might have gotten a bit worse. I'm just going to be excited that it means more ultrasounds for monitoring. We go back in 8 weeks to recheck. I guess if it doesn't move we are looking at a Csection. I'm terrified of a Csection, but will endure what I need to in order to get my little guy out!

So finally, the doctor starts checking out the heart. He indicates that there is a "bright spot" or an echogenic focus on the heart. He immiediately says "This can raise the odds for a DS pregnancy." My heart dropped. We've been through this. We've had a DS pregnancy. We lost our T21 baby and are devestated about the loss. I couldn't believe we might have to go through something like that again. The Dr. said the nurse could recalcuate our odds from our integrated screening. So the odds went from 1 in 3100 to 1 in 1900. I know it seems crazy to continue to worry with odds that great, but I just can't help it. After being the ONE (two times in a row), it's hard to imagine fate passing us by and letting us be one of the 1900.

The doctor was in a hurry and wanted to leave for the day. I did feel like it was a little rushed. He left the room left me to get dressed. When I came back out he was back in the room and said he just realized I would be a good candidate for the Harmony test, which they were just starting to offer. In fact if I agreed I would be their first patient, because they didn't even have the paperwork or anything yet. They were going to figure all of that out and get back to me.

At first I was eager to get that done. J sort of talked me out of it though and I think he's right. We are now committed to this pregnancy. We are 21 weeks. I could not live with myself if I terminated a baby at 21 weeks. It would be even later by the time we did the test and got the results. So by then we might be out of the range of termination anyway. But even so, we had already decided not to terminate. I was willing to carry any baby as long as I could. Whether it had a fatal prenatal diagnosis or abnormal chromosomes we were committed. So the test would only give us more to worry about. If there were more health issues involved or more soft markers maybe we would do testing, but at this point he looks healthy. Often the EF is nothing. Tons of babies have it and are born just fine. The research I've done looks like between 5-10% of babies have this. The DS connection comes in becuase up to 30% of DS babies have the EF. But it's not a direct connection. Babies with and WITHOUT DS have this EF. So I'm hoping that the screening bloodwork works for us just like it did with Bear. With Bear it came out positivie and he did have DS. I'm hoping that with this LO it came out negative and those results will turn out to be spot on!

Now I just need to get through 19 more weeks :)!