Wednesday, December 2, 2009

NT Scan info and date change

The date for my NT Scan has been changed. Not sure if I've mentioned this so far with Squish. The date was originally set up for this Friday, December 4th. It's been moved to next Friday, December 11th.

I wrote about the NT Scan with Christopher. NT stands for Nuchal Translucency screening. The reason the date had to be changed is that there is a very small time period that the test can be done. It has to be done between 11 and 13w6d, the day you turn 14 weeks it's too far along to get it done and your results will can be inaccurate.

The test can only be performed by ultrasound techs that have to be specially certified to do the test, and in fetal medicine, and the machines have to be sensitive enough to measure accurately. The test is performed by the tech measuring the thickness of the skin on the back of the babies neck. Babies with abnormalities tend to have more fluid built up in the back of their neck. They measure that (isn't it cool that we have the ability to measure the thickness of skin on the back of a 12w old babies neck?) and take some blood and that's it. If nothing else it's another excuse for an ultrasound (yay).

With Christopher they called a few days later and let us know the results. The test will pick up things like Down's Syndrome, Edward's Syndrome, Turner's Syndrome, and Patau's Syndrome. Okay I have no clue what the last three are - but it picks up a lot of things. It will also show if you are a low risk, or high risk. The results are not 100% accurate - you can get false negatives or positives, as well as be told that you are super low risk and still have a baby with a problem.

The reason that I HAVE to have this test done is that there are abnormalities that it will pick up that will keep Dr. Dickson (the high risk OB) from doing the cerclage. It picks up things that will show whether or not the baby can survive outside of the womb, and things that will show if the baby won't make it past 20 weeks and such. They will not put the cerclage in if they are 100% certain that any of the harsher abnormalities exist. The reason being that if some of them exist my body will end up aborting the pregnancy anyway - and the cerclage could end up holding an aborted baby. I know that sounds really bad - but it does make sense. If my body were to decide to abort the baby shortly after one ultrasound to check my cervix - it could be 2 weeks before the next and the risks of me ending up dangerously infected are extremely high. It could be deadly to me.

As I understand it I'll be finding out about the cerclage when they do the NT scan. If nothing else I'll get a date when the results come back. Dr. Dickson told me that he wants the cerclage in by 14 weeks. That puts it being done right around Christmas time - they may push it later because of the holidays but we will see. I'm also curious about what his plans are for my time in the hospital, and stuff after that.

Once the cerclage is in they will be doing cervical checks at least every two weeks. Which will mean lots of ultrasounds. When I spoke to the ultrasound tech at my last ultrasound she said that since I will be getting the scans so often they probably won't do much other looking at the baby.

For those asking - it probably will not be until around 20 weeks that we find out the sex of the baby. There won't be a lot of extra looking because the ultrasounds are going to be done so much.

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