Yesterday, I was thinking back to when I went through fetal surgery with Alison. Because of our choice to do that, we took a pregnancy where we knew the outcome would result in a live baby and made it into one where anything could happen....she could have died during the surgery, she could have been born extremely prematurely and died, she could have been really premature and had a lot of related health problems. We had no way of knowing what was going to happen. But once the decision to have the surgery was made, I also made the decision that she was going to stay put until 37 weeks and she was going to be fine. That's just all there was to it. She had other ideas and decided to only stay put until 36 1/2 weeks, but that was close enough. Despite some initial breathing issues, she was fine and was able to come home 5 days later. Aside from needing to be shunted for hydrocephalus at 7 months old, she has not had any real Spina Bifida related issues.

After pondering on this for a little while I came to the conclusion that I would really like to just be able to decide that this baby is going to be fine, too, and have that be that. But, at the same time I'm worried about what will happen to me if I make that decision and the baby doesn't make it. I talked to Kevin about that feeling a little bit yesterday and he said he just wished that we would go to our appointment on Wednesday and find that the problem was gone. That would be nice, but realistically we both know it's not going to happen.

Since yesterday, I've been feeling remarkably calm. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing....if it means I know subconsciously that everything is going to be fine, or if I've just accepted the inevitable. Despite this calmness, however, I avoided our neighbors when we went to Kevin's softball game last night (the neighbor plays on the opposing team), just because they knew we were having the ultrasound and I didn't really want to talk about it last night.

Kevin has been doing research on the internet about fetal hydrops. Most of it is very discouraging. Yesterday, he came across some information that was somewhat contradictory to everything else we've read. It suggests that fetal hydrops is much more common than the 1 in 3000 pregnancies that we've seen elsewhere, that it is actually occurs in 1 of every 625 pregnancies. And it can develop quickly.....one woman in the study was fine at 24 weeks and at 26 weeks the baby had fetal hydrops. It also lists mortality rates ranging from 50% to 90%, depending on the cause. The cause with the best outcome has already been ruled out for us.....my test for 5th's disease came back negative. So we're still in wait-and-see mode.

And just to make things even more confusing, the baby has been more active in the last two days than it has been in over a week. It's frustrating because one of the symptoms of fetal hydrops is supposed to be decreased fetal movement and what we're getting is the opposite.