12 weeks 2 days pregnant
We were very excited to have our first appointment with our perinatologist on December 21st. My OB sent me to a perinatologist since I will be 35 years old when I deliver. I was excited to go because that meant more ultrasounds and more pictures of our sweet baby! Our plan for the appointment was to get a good look at our baby and ask if we could do the new "gender blood test"...we were so anxious to find out if we were going to have a boy or a girl (everyone thought our baby would be a girl!). We didn't even really consider that the test for gender was actually a test for Trisomy 21, 18, and 13.
We went in for the ultrasound and the technician took a while to get measurements and pictures. When she left the room, I told David that I had such a peace about this pregnancy and that I wasn't as anxious as I had been through my first pregnancy. Then the doctor came in...and he took even longer and wasn't saying much. Finally, he said that the baby's "nuchal fold" was twice as thick as it should be and that we needed to come into his office to discuss.
When we got into his office, he said there was a 20% chance that there was something very wrong with our baby. He was focusing on the 20% chance of something wrong rather than the 80% chance that the baby was ok. Through his discussion he was encouraging us to take a more aggressive route of having a CVS test right away to determine if something was wrong, and if his suspicions were confirmed then we could "decide what our next steps would be"...we took took that to mean terminating the pregnancy. We told him that we were not even going to consider termination and that we would like to take the less aggressive route at that point, which happened to be the "gender blood test" that we now needed not just for the gender determination. We now had to have that test so we could rule out the possibility of Trisomy 21, 18, or 13.
I rushed over to LabCorp so I could get the blood test sent out as soon as possible. It would take 10-14 days to receive the results of the test.
During this hard time of waiting on the results, David reached out to the Elders of our church and asked if they would be willing to pray for us. Not only were they willing to pray for us, they actually met with us after the Christmas Eve service at church, anointed us with oil, laid hands on us, and prayed that the results of this test would come back and everything would be ok...and they also prayed that if the test results were not as we hoped, that The Lord would prepare us for the journey ahead. We asked our family to pray the same thing for us and they did as well.