Perinatologist Appointment

We went to our perinatologist appointment yesterday, me, Jack, Granny Ernestine, and our baby daughter. It went very well in terms of getting genetic counseling and seeing the baby again on ultrasound. We took a blank video tape and got about 40 minutes of fetus footage to start her video album to go with the still shots of her as a one-celled being back on her conception date in 2002. My how times have changed.

We met with the genetic counselor who said our original Down Syndrome testing odds came back at 1:28, our follow up test with corrected maternal age came back at 1:330, and our third correction came back at 1:90. Don't ask us to explain this. The bottom line is we just want to know if we'll deliver a live child, Down Syndrome or not. In truth, we do not believe we are carrying a Down's child, but diagnosis cannot be made without either amniocentesis, which we refuse to do, or delivering the child and getting a good look at her. The other tests showed she has a 1:10,000 chance of chromosomal abnormality.

The rest of the appointment was the ultrasound, where the perinatologist (the partner of the one who worked me up/over in the hospital two weeks ago) took measurements of every tiny part of our daughter. He joked along with us as he went and concluded our baby showed no outward signs of Down Syndrome.

Our daughter looks ripped, by the way. You should have seen her biceps. Jack nearly fell off his chair when the doctor rolled the ultrasound wand over her rather well-endowed leg muscles. She looked like she was part jumping frog or maybe Uncle Mike Jennings. Remeasurement of her femur suggests it is a normal length (perhaps compared with the rest of her dimensions, rather than compared with the dimensions of other babies of her gestational age), but her tibia bone was proportionally long. Part frog, part gorilla, apparently. The doctor also commented on her prominent ears and we thought her profile showed an upturned nose. What a looker!

Unfortunately we expected this appointment to provide us more information about my bedrest and the integrity of my placenta. This was not the focus of the appointment, apparently. We did, however, learn that the hematoma is indeed a subchorionic hematoma (SCH), and it has shrunk from 8 cm to 6.6 cm in two weeks' time. That is excellent news. Neither the placenta previa nor the status of my cervix was evaluated. We have no news about how much longer I'll be on bedrest, whether bedrest is helping prevent early delivery, or how serious a threat this particular SCH is. Most SCH's are diagnosed in the first trimester. The ones diagnosed in the second trimester or third trimesters with profuse bleeding are more worrisome. We do see our OB next week, so perhaps we'll get more information then.

Thanks for tuning in!