I had a big long entry written last night, but blogger ate it when I attempted to publish it. :( So I guess I'll try and reconstruct it.

I am now just over 27 weeks pregnant. We had our weekly appointment yesterday. I also had an ultrasound. It was kind of a good news/bad news thing. The good news is that the baby is still growing. I was able to read the head measurement and it was about 26 1/2 weeks and the baby's estimated weight is 1 1/4 pounds. The bad news is that there is still no fluid (or possibly only very miniscule pockets) around the baby. But I must say that I have now thoroughly confused all my doctors. Our appointment was with my "real" doctor, whom I haven't seen in about 5 weeks. After the u/s we talked about what has been happening in those last 5 weeks, how we thought at that time time the end was imminent but that something suddenly changed only two days later. That, together with what the u/s showed and the fact that is has been 9 weeks since the baby was diagnosed with fetal hydrops made my doctor decided to call the perinatalogist we saw that gave us the initial diagnosis, just to see if he had any input. His thoughts? He can't understand why the baby has made it this far. His concern now that we are fast approaching viability is that without fluid, the lungs can't develop. There's a technical term for it, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is....pulmonary something-or-other. He feels we should go back to U of M and have them take another look at things and pursue chromosomal analysis. This will tell us if there is a lethal chromosomal problem, which would determine how things are handled at delivery.

That's right...we are now entertaining the possibility, remote that it is, that this pregnancy will result in a live (though very premature, I'm sure) birth rather than a stillbirth. I swear, if I wasn't actually living this, I'd be thinking that someone was making up one hell of a whopper to garner everyone's sympathy. Of course, the chances that the baby will survive are smaller than the possibility of it being born alive.

When we met with the pediatric cardiologist, we asked about when the baby could be viable. The doctor said that healthy babies can be viable from 25 weeks onward, but that for our baby, with the heart damage it already had, we would need to get to 31 or 32 weeks. Since that was still 12 weeks away, we knew it was never going to happen. But now, here we are, staring that "goal" in the face. Because we never imagined it was possible, we didn't even bother asking what could be done at that point. Now we're kind of wondering.

We had problems with low fluid with Alison, though hers were surgery related. At that time, our doctor had mentioned the possiblity of amnio infusion. Yesterday, after our appointment, Kevin and I talked about it. Not in a particularly serious way, more along the lines of "hey, remember how Alison had low fluid problems and Dr. W____ mentioned doing a "reverse amnio?" We quickly agreed that it probably wouldn't do anything in this case and wouldn't even be worth pursuing. I mentioned this to my doctor when she called yesterday and she did say that sometimes doctors will go ahead with it in order to be able to get a better look at the baby or to make it easier to do a cordiocentisis. So this may actually be something suggested for us. There are risks involved, particularly fetal demise. That's why Dr. W____ wasn't chomping at the bit to do a regular amnio. He was concerned that if the baby died, we wouldn't know if it was because of fetal hydrops or the amnio. But since we've been preparing ourselves for the baby to die for the last 9 weeks anyway, what difference will it really make, right?

While I was chatting with the doctor, I menitoned that I had talked to my mom that afternoon and she said she wouldn't be surprised if Dr. W____ wanted to see me again. I told her I agreed, since who wouldn't want to see my second "freak of nature." The doctor laughed and said she didn't know how I did it, kept going through this, and didn't understand why I was being put through two such difficult pregnancies. I said sometimes you just do what you have to do and that God must have a warped sense of humor. :)



Now, on a totally unrelated subject, and as kind of a follow-up to my last entry, yesterday between 12 pm and 6 pm Alison went through 3 pairs of underwear and 2 pull-ups (because by that point we ran out of clean underwear), and when all was said and done, was on her third pair of pants. The three pairs of underwear were wet accidents, the two pull-ups were poopy ones. Each and every time, the incident was announced to me and accompanied with "but it's ok, mommy." Who would have thought that all the progress we had made over the last 6 weeks could be undone with three little words: oh, that's ok. So I want to say a big thanks a lot to my wonderful MIL. @@