November 10 - 18 weeks + 4 days specialist appointment

I know this is a few days late, but I just haven't really had the chance to do up a blog post yet. We had our appointment with the specialist on Wednesday.

She was asleep at the start of the ultrasound, with her back to the
world, sitting sideways/breech and sort-of folded on her legs sound
asleep.



The nurse poked my tummy and woke her up so that we could see some fetal movement during the ultrasound...well then she didn't want to sit still! Everything looks good. She does have a "bright" spot in the pulmonary muscles of the heart. Dr. Butt said that in about 10% of cases is a soft marker for Downs syndrome, however, my maternal serum screen gives us an odds of downs at 1:8000 or so. She said that with the bright spot it would bring our odds of Downs to 1:4600 which is really nothing to be concerned about. The baby's arms, legs are nice and long, her kidneys are not inflamed, the bowels are not bright, she does not have extra fluid in the spine and brain, and she doesn't have a short nose bone, all of which are characteristic of a Downs baby. I asked several times if the bright spot in the heart could be a sign of congenital heart defects, or a problem within the heart. She reassured me that the brightness has nothing to do with the function of the baby's heart. The heart is working fine. She said "It will probably disappear...we'll watch it.. but if this happened in another pregnancy, just as it presents now, I wouldn't have a need to see the patient, so I'm really not concerned about it". She said at the end of the ultrasound "the baby looks good, placenta looks good, I'll see you in 4 weeks".

She also used the probe to check my cervix also and everything looks fine in that department; still long and closed. She said that she couldn't see any source of intra-uterine bleeding, and there are no clots forming within the uterus, so she figures that the bleeding is likely coming from the cervix itself. This is exactly what I have been told all along, but it is still nice to hear it, especially when I had been bleeding off and on for over a week.

So here are the remainder of the pictures. In the first one, it looks like she's talking on the phone! Mouth wide open! Our girl Iris came with us, and I heard her say when this picture was taken "I wonder where she gets that from?" The Doctor said the same thing a few minutes later..it was like surround sound! So here she is, weighing all of 9 ounces!