When we reached this milestone, I wanted to be able to shout this announcement from the mountaintops, shoot off some fireworks, and do the MC Hammer dance up and down the street. But now my reaction is subdued and filled with reticence.
The good news is that I am pregnant, and things look to be on track for Charles and I to have a baby in April 2012.
The bad news is that based on the first trimester screenings I am now considered a high-risk pregnancy.
Involved in the first trimester screening is an ultrasound measurement of the fluid at the back of the neck of the fetus (nuchal translucency) and two blood tests – hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) and PAPP-A (pregnancy-associated plasma protein A). Laboratories will enter the results from these tests into a computer, crunch numbers and compare them to ladies who are the same age/race/ethnicity, etc. and spit out a risk of a fetus having a chromosomal abnormality (Down’s Syndrome and Trisomy 18/13, to be specific).
My risk of having a child with Down’s Syndrome, based solely on age and race/ethnicity, prior to the sonogram and blood tests was 1 in 371. My risk after the sonogram and blood tests is now 1 in 14. In other words, we have a 7% chance of having a child with Down’s Syndrome. The risk of one of the other fatal chromosomal disorders has increased slightly, but is still approximately 1 in 500.
My blood test results by themselves would not be considered out of the ordinary, however, combined with “bad” results of the fluid measurements in the ultrasound, my risk factors have increased.
For now, this could mean a number of things:
a) I am in that 7% and our child has Down’s Syndrome,
b) our child has some other chromosomal disorder,
c) our child has a heart defect (or some other genetic disorder),
d) none of the above, and we will have a “normal” baby (really, how normal can anyone from our family be?).
To say the past few days since getting the ultrasound results and waiting on the blood test results has been hard is an understatement. Anticipating a joyous announcement to family and friends only to be thrust into a living nightmare has been unthinkable. For the women that have this type of screening and get good results, it comes as a relief. For those that get bad results, it brings nothing but stress, anger, sadness and anxiety, making the testing definitely not worth it in my opinion.
The final results are more encouraging than the original statements of doom and gloom, but we are still not out of the woods yet. As with any pregnancy there is a chance for untoward results: miscarriage, stillbirth, newborn demise; and they say we have a higher risk of these outcomes.
I, for one, am choosing to place my faith in God’s plan. Coming up we will have the second trimester ultrasound in about a month to measure fetal growth and check for any heart defects. Until then we wait and incubate.
I would post a picture from the ultrasound, but it’s pretty blurry.
Instead, I’ll leave you with a picture of our other baby:
