Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Well we finally got power on Saturday but since Jeff had been three whole days without a fantasy baseball sighting, computer time was hard to come by. So today I shall post about the ultrasound...

It was such a wild and crazy experience. First of all I should not have drank nearly as much water as I did but in classic Erika fashion I thought if they say 24 oz in one hour I will try to make it at least 40 oz. just to be on the safe side. (Supposedly the fuller your bladder the better they can see everything.) With the fullness of my bladder they should have just been able to see straight through me without the machine. The tech said she had never seen such a full bladder. Because of this I was fairly miserable during the whole experience because I had to pee like no other. So next time I will just follow the instructions.

It is a little bit weird. You lay down, they rub some goo on your belly and suddenly you are see through. It is the oddest thing. They would say here is the arm and that really looked like an arm or at least an x-ray of an arm. Then they would say this if the stomach and bladder. That looked more like an ink blot. We saw the baby's hands and feet as well as all of the major organs and they said that everything looked really good. Then at the end of the exam they said that the only minor thing was a cyst on the chortoid in the brain. It didn't sound very minor to me at the time. They said that it is a little thing and the only reason they were bringing it up is because it can be a marker for a disease called Trisomy 18 which is a very severe genetic disorder. They offered us an amniocentesis which would tell us conclusively that it was or wasn't this disease but then they said that 1\200 amnios result in loss of the baby. Not very good odds in my book. Luckily we had a doctors appointment right after this so they told us to talk things over with our doctor.

Thank goodness for our doctor. She basically said not to be scared that this cyst if that really is what it is, is probably no big deal. She had never delivered a baby with Trisomy 18 that you did not know conclusively from the ultrasound that that is what it was. This cyst is one marker out of like six and the other five markers were not there. To reassure everyone she is ordering another ultrasound for 6-8 weeks and she bets the cyst will be gone. So we still feel pretty positive but it certainly gives us a very specific prayer request.

In all of this we also found out that it is a girl! What a relief since we could not agree on a boy name. Emilia Mae will probably be her name barring any sort of craziness between now and December. They confirmed our due date for 12/10 and said the baby is approximately 12 oz. Which is normal. So in September I will probably have another ultrasound but in the meantime please pray for Emmy that the cyst would clear itself up and that she would be healthy.

One final note about the power - I think it was God's way of telling me to clean out the refrigerator. Just as I finished scrubbing the last shelf the power came back on. Now when I open the door to the fridge I am downright gleeful!