Today was our 20 week BIG ultrasound appointment where they were going to do the anatomy scan and in our minds, most importantly tell us the sex of the baby! Our ultrasound tech was a pretty unprofessional person being that our very first ultrasound with her at 7 weeks, she was cursing up a storm talking about her bad day and abusive father who she no longer cared about and was glad he was currently alone in a nursing home! So going in for our second and very exiting ultrasound, we just laughed at how out-there her personality was and that she should be entertaining once again for this appointment.She began the ultrasound and was pretty quiet.
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And let me first say that for most of this pregnancy I've had a feeling that something was wrong or off. Starting from the beginning, our very first ultrasound on December 9th at 7 weeks, the baby was measuring 1 week 'behind' according to my last period which gave me an expected due date of July 24th, 2011. So because of that, they actually changed my due date to July 30th, 2011.That should have been the first sign that something was wrong, even though yes, many women do get their due dates changed all the time and have perfectly healthy babies. From then on, I've had fleeting thoughts of wondering how the baby was growing. I always wished we had more ultrasounds in between because I wanted to see if it was developing right. Within a couple weeks from then I started to have some spotting. Because it was always a brownish color, my doctor said not to worry, that it was old blood, from ME, not from the BABY and that it is really quite common. Let me tell you, that spotting did not stop for a month and a half. Finally, it did stop for a couple weeks and I was relieved. I then had two episodes in February, 4 days apart, of spotting bright red, but only a little bit. Since then, I have not had any spotting whatsoever. That issue probably added to my idea that something wasn't going quite right as well as what my intuition told me. After doing some research, I expected to have a placental problem of some sort, nothing too serious.This whole pregnancy I have been praying for God to heal my baby if anything was wrong and to bring me peace and comfort for any news we were going to find out.
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Going back to our BIG ultrasound... we were excited! I was trying my hardest to push my negative thoughts to the side and just be happy to be able to see my baby on the screen and finally find out if it was going to be a boy or a girl.The tech started and was pretty quiet. I was getting antsy so I had to ask, "Is it alive?" She said yes, she sees it moving around. She started at the head and worked her way down to its legs. My husband Adam and my mom were with me. They kept commenting on the baby's 'long legs' and that it was moving its arms around. She was measuring our baby with one hand while nursing a coffee in the other. I don't know why, but this rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn't wait for her to turn the screen towards me so I could finally see my baby! Whens she did, she started to explain the its abdomen was abnormally small, actually, it was VERY small compared to the rest of the body. She said the head, legs and arms were measuring normally, but that the abdomen was extremely small. I was like "okay" trying to keep my composure.Instead of going to get the doctor or explaining what she was seeing further, she began to get very fidgety, stuttering her words, saying she's never seen this before in her 20 years of doing this and that she's 'just so confused' while giving us the visual of her throwing her hands up in the air with a look of disbelief. Then, to make matters worse, she started throwing out random thoughts, like making comments like, 'well it doesn't look like a case of dwarfism, does that run in any of your families?' Umm, no lady, and before you go any further, go get the doctor and don't say anything unless you actually know what you're talking about. We asked if she could see the gender and she told us, she couldn't tell. In other words, she was so stunned by the look of our baby on the screen, she didn't even try. I started crying my eyes out while we waited for the doctor to come in. When he did, he didn't tell us much else besides that he's seen it a couple times before, and that he wanted us to get a level II, target ultrasound at UAB in Birmingham because they had better machines.
Leaving the doctors office, I still had to get my blood work done, so in tears, I went to do that. They said we should be hearing from them with an appointment at UAB as soon as it was done. Adam called UAB directly that whole day trying to get some news, praying we'd be able to go in the very next day to ease or mind and get some answers. Finally at the end of the day, they mentioned on appt for tuesday of the following week, March 8th. We got through the week and weekend by doing a lot of research and praying for our baby! In all honesty, I was not nervous at all about the target ultrasound because through all of my research, the only thing that kept coming up was IUGR (intrauterine growth restriction). There is symetircal, where the whole baby is measuring smaller than it should, and asymetrical, where only one part of the baby is measuring small (in our case, our baby's abdomen). What we found was that these babies were almost always delivered early, weekly monitoring and ultrasounds would be performed, and the minute the baby stopped growing (which they always would), they would then induce and the baby would be in the NICU, and end up thriving and growing. They are always small for their age, but typically catch up completely though their toddler years. I also read that the culprate to this issue, was in many cases a bad placenta or SUA cord. I was completely fine with this diagnoses and was actually praying for this diagnosis!! That got me through to the next week, the thought that our baby was fine, just small. So I started eating overtime to make sure my baby was getting as many nutrients that it could!
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