Gametes In Love

Mondays are my busiest days of the week. It’s nothing but meetings back-to-back. Today I had the pleasure of starting my day with my first conference call at 8:00am only to transition to more meetings lasting through 5pm. Luckily I stole away 15 minutes to go grab lunch. As I was ordering my “to-go” sandwich I saw that I had missed a call on my mobile. I also immediately saw an SMS pop-up. It was S telling me that the clinic that did our integrated screening called, and I should call them back. This could have meant one of two things:

1. Integrated screening results are in, or
2. They needed to reschedule my follow-up ultrasound.

It was the first! I was a little surprised because, honestly, I wasn’t expecting their call until the end of this week.

I walked out of the cafeteria on the way back to my desk trying to balance my sandwich bag, bottle of water, banana and yogurt (yep pregnant chicks eat a lot, although the last two were my afternoon snacks) while dialing the clinic. I had 5 minutes to make this call. It was probably good that I was rushing to yet another meeting, because at least I had no time to worry if the news would be good or bad. The woman I needed to speak with picked up the phone… then I kind of froze: it had hit me what I was about to hear. I needed to sit down.

The integrated screening we had done tested for Trisomy 21 and Trisomy 18. Both are chromosomal abnormalities which cause Down Syndrome, mental retardation or other various medical problems. Few babies with Trisomy 18 survive more than a few months following birth.

But the news was good! For both of the above my risk factor for having either abnormality is 1/10,000. That’s 99.99% chance that our baby will be just perfect. Additionally we have a 1/2,100 risk factor for our child having an open spinal chord defect. This, I was told, is also the lowest risk bracket. All in all this doesn’t mean that we are in the clear: after all it’s not a diagnostic test, but these are odds I can happily live with.

The rest of my day, I have to tell you, has gone just fine! Granted, I’ve been dealing with the shake-out of a rough last week, but all of a sudden now everything else that I’m dealing with feels so much less important. This is probably the best news I’ll get in a long while.

Now I’m ready to feel the baby move! Bring it on 🙂

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Baking Baby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.