i just want to start by saying thanks to everyone who read my last post and offered words of encouragement virtually and in person, although it is still sometimes strange to realize just how many people in my day to day life read this, it is at the same time wonderful to realize that i belong to such a community of people rooting for me, it's nice.
for those of you that don't know, i did get a call from the doctor the day after i wrote my last post and the tests results were troubling. we made an appointment to go in the next day and then spent the night worrying and biting our nails to the quick. worst case scenarios were pondered and the question "what if" got thrown around. in the end we decided not to answer the question until we knew what we were facing. what we are facing, it turns out, isn't nearly as bad as we had anticipated. the triple screen returns results based on probability and it stacks that probability against what is "normal" in your age category. there is a line that gets drawn as abnormal when the ratio deviates too far from the norm. for us it was down's syndrome that brought back the positive. for my age normal is 1 in 666, our number came back 1 in 333. this was enough for the bells to ring and the lights to flash, but for us it was a huge relief. next to 666 it may seem like a lot but 1 in 333 is still pretty decent odds considering. so our next step is a diagnostic ultrasound on monday to look for down's markers and then right after we will meet with a genetic counsellor to talk about the findings and what to do next. i am still in the wait and see mode. i still don't know the answer to the "what if" question, but my friend paul said to me today "perfection comes in many different packages", which i think sums it up well. everyone keep your fingers crossed for us.
in other more fun and less gloomy news, cohen, nicole and i went to the pumpkin patch in richmond on the weekend. it was a really good time. there was a band called "the country bumpkins" that played kids tunes while a huge stuffed strawberry, pumpkin and corn on the cob danced around in the hay. cohen, never one to miss the opportunity for some dancing swayed his hips and stamped his legs to the beat. we also went on a hayride complete with an accordion player, as well as travelled through a corn maze to get to the pumpkin patch where cohen helped pick out all of our pumpkins, he even helped put each of them in our bags for us. he loves to put things in containers and then take the out again these days. it was like the pne of autumn, there were even mini donuts and farm animals (which cohen didn't seem scared of this time). i would definitely go back, despite the ankle deep mud and that smell.
sunday was supposed to be costume day at granville island, but it was pouring rain and i just didn't have it in me to make the trek, but don't worry, i did manage to eat lots of candy. i am off tomorrow and the sun is supposed to shine so hopefully we will get out and he will be able to do some hopping in his frog costume. now if only we could get him to say ribbett...
3 comments:
good luck with the ultrasound, I'll be thinking of you! And pregnancy hormones are mean and nasty some times, but then they're trying to do wonderful things and the mother's mood is probably the least of their worries.
I also know what you mean about feeling unconnected. We've gone through stages where D would refuse to come to me, prefering Daddy, and it hurt so much. Working does make evenings short and brings a whole other level of exhaustion into the picture. But life's life and I'm amazed at D's resilience and how he does always come back to me in the end. No matter how much fun they have at nursery, it's the people who are there for them when they are sick or crying in the night that are the parents.
One thing you have to remember with the Triple Screen is that it has a 25% false-positive. I had a friend who was told she had a 1/100 chance of having a Downs baby and all the specialists were talking like it a was a certainty. Then she had further tests, and voila, nothing. She found it a very upsetting process and decided not to have the test with her second pregnancy.
But the pumpkin patch! The pumpkin patch looks like a blast.
m - i have heard that the test has an even higher false positive rate, which is why i am keeping it in perspective. with maia we didn't do it for that very reason, but after much contemplation with cohen we decided we would rather know if something is wrong then be surprised again. one step at a time is where we are at. there would have to be some pretty serious evidence to suggest a problem before we would evn consider amnio and as of right now i am not worried, so hopefully after monday it will be put to rest completely.
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