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| 20 weeks |
We obviously hit 20 weeks and are now officially past the halfway point! Yikes. Now settle in for a long and kind of scary story.
I had my 20 week appointment on April 23 which was pretty uneventful. A quick listen to the heartbeat and that was about it. On my way out the door, the doctor rushed over to say he forgot to mention the AFP blood test. It was optional, but would test for spina bifida and other nerual tube defects. I said “if it’s easy, I might as well.” He told me it was just a blood draw so I ran over to the lab next door, got it done, and was on my way.
Well, this ended up starting a whole week of fear and stress. Who knew?! On Tuesday, May 1, I got an email that I had new test results in my online patient portal. I clicked over and was SHOCKED to see that my bloodwork came back positive and read a recommendation that further testing was recommended. I excused myself to the break room and immediately called my doctor. While the phone was ringing, I had another call coming in, and it happened to be my doctor. “I was just calling you!” I told him, in a frenzied state. “You saw the test results?” Yes, yes I did. He advised me that I’d be going to see a specialist at the hospital and receiving an ultrasound from them too where they’d closely be looking at the spine. He assured me he was not very concerned and was just taking this as an extra measure of precaution. Despite his reassurances, I called Jerry crying. He told me he was sure everything was okay. After a couple of mix ups with booking an appointment, they got me in at the hospital for Friday.
Fast forward to the next day, Wednesday, and we had our regular 20 week anatomy ultrasound at my doctor’s office. We mentioned our AFP results to the tech, and she said that in her personal opinion, everything looked fine. That really gave me some relief, and we enjoyed the rest of the ultrasound. He had grown a lot, and we CLEARLY saw and confirmed that HE is indeed a HE! We left with some printouts, a DVD, and a cute onesie from the office.
Friday finally came and I left work early to pick Jerry up. We had a very lengthy ultrasound and the baby was moving a ton. I loved seeing his little legs bouncing and his feet crossed. She thoroughly inspected his abdomen, spine, and head… all areas of concern.
We patiently waited for the doctor after the scan, and he entered the room. “I’ll cut to the chase,” he said. “The baby is fine. Now let’s go into my office and I’ll bore you for 15 minutes with WHY the baby is fine.” So much relief in that moment.
So here is what he explained to us, the best way that I can understand it. AFP is a protein that is produced by the baby. Generally speaking, it should not be in the mom’s system. They do the blood test to see if there is any AFP in the mom’s system, and my blood test showed that there was, indeed, a small amount of AFP in my blood. Now the doctors have to figure out why and how it got there. Sometimes, it can be caused by Spina Bifida or Hydrocephaly. After examining baby’s spine and skull, they determined he DID not have either of these things and that he looked great. That means the AFP got into my blood some other way. The doctor suspects there was a placental abrasion, which I’m understanding to mean there was a small tear in the placenta that allowed some of the AFP to leak into my system. The placenta looked good so he believed it to be resolved BUT to be sure the placenta is, in fact, fine, I will now have a growth ultrasound once a month to make sure the baby is still growing on track. And growing he is! On Wednesday, he was 12 ounces, and on Friday, he was 14 ounces already!
Needless to say, we are all so happy. According to the doctor, with my positive AFP results, the baby still only had a 99.1% chance of having a neural tube defect anyway (only 1 in 105 positive results end up with a baby who has a defect), but now we know he’s fine. Thank God!
So that was our baby drama of the last week. Let’s move onto the more mundane things now!
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| 21 weeks |
My cravings have moved on. At first, it was French Onion soup for a few weeks, then Chicken French for a couple of more weeks, and now… French Dip sandwiches. It is a totally odd coincidence that all of my recent cravings have French in their names. I’m all about the salty though.
More news on the bedroom fronts! As you know, Caleb is still in the nursery, but we started prepping his “big boy” room a couple of weeks ago. Over the weekend, we accomplished a lot more. I started bringing some of his clothes over, and we did a deep clean in the nursery. I cleared EVERYTHING off the floor and then vacuumed, and then Jerry used the carpet cleaning machine we have to freshen it up (Dakota likes to think of the rug as his personal bathroom once in awhile when we’re not home… JERK). The room is nearly back to basics now, though Caleb is still sleeping in the crib in there. Last steps will be to finish emptying Caleb’s clothes out of the dresser in there and moving them over, and then getting him to sleep in the bed in his new room (soon). We found out that we do NOT have mold in his new room, so we can start trying to get him sleeping in there pretty soon. Once his clothes are cleared out, we can start bringing in newborn clothes for the baby, and will move a few final things over (a few more of Cal’s toys and his signs that say “Caleb”). Long story short… Caleb’s new room is almost ready, and so is the baby’s nursery!
I bought my first pack of diapers for the baby at Aldi and am going to start building up a small stash. Other things we still need / want: a new crib mattress, a new diaper bag, new bottles and binkies, new onesies and some new outfits (different season babies), and a new infant carseat with two bases. A lot of other stuff will be re-used, but those are definitely on the “to-buy soon” list.
Other than that, baby is moving and grooving and his movements have really started to pick up. I love feeling his little rolls and kicks. Counting down the days until we meet our new little guy!
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