Abnormalities

The joy and excitement of finding out that our baby was a boy came to a screeching halt about 30 minutes after we found out. Our ultrasound appointment was this past Wednesday (May 12th) at 3pm. We were scheduled to see our OB (Dr Voss) at 4pm. While we were waiting for the OB, we called our moms, sent text messages, updated Facebook, etc, so the whole world would know that Baby Johnson is a boy. That's when the OB came in and said "we need to talk about the results of the ultrasound". It was pretty clear that something was wrong.

To back up - Our due date is September 23rd. As the ultrasound tech was taking different measurements, the screen kept displaying estimated delivery dates around October 10th (just over 2 weeks later than our actual due date). I looked at the calendar on my phone and we knew for sure that those dates were wrong. But we just figured that the baby was small. That seemed to make sense since his momma's small.

As it turns out, there's not a ton of variance in size for babies this early (21 weeks), as opposed to the last 2 months of a pregnancy where growth can vary significantly from baby to baby. It could be completely normal to be a little small, but it could also be a sign of chromosomal abnormalities. In addition to the baby being small, the ultrasound also revealed an enlarged stomach and a "prominent" heart. The OB at first said the heart was enlarged but then changed her wording to prominent.

According to Dr Voss, each of these issues individually can be indicators of chromosomal abnormalities such as Down's Syndrome, Trisomy 13, and Trisomy 18. Trisomy 13 and 18 are very serious abnormalities that have very high miscarriage/stillbirth rates and babies with those conditions have less than a 1% chance of living past their first birthday (which we didn't know until later that evening).

So this was all very shocking to us, and very frightening. Dr Voss was able to call a perinatologist (located just down the hall), who was able to get us in the very next day (Thursday May 13th). So we went home pretty teary eyed and in total shock. 30 minutes earlier we were ecstatic to finally know the sex of our baby, and now we were scared, devastated, and in shock.

That night we called family and did lots of research on various chromosomal abnormalities. Learning about Trisomy 13 and 18 made the situation even more frightening. Despite our fear, we tried our best to trust God's sovereignty over the situation, although I'm not so sure we did a great job of it that night!