Dear Spike:
Your mother called me this afternoon at work. The conversation was routine for our 4 p.m. chats — “how’s your day” and whatnot — but she didn’t sound well.
“Is everything OK?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Can you come home early? I got a call from Dr. Stewart today.”
Through sobs, she told me that a blood test she took last week had come back positive, potentially indicating you have a condition known as Trisomy 18 — a severe kind of Down Syndrome.
“Most babies with it don’t live,” she cried. “I’m so afraid. I don’t want to lose Spike.”
On the way home, I got a call from my mother-in-law, your grandmother. "I just talked to Heidi," she said. "You know, this is how her sister lost a child."
The knot in my stomach tightened.
I made it home just a few minutes before your mom. The house was a mess. We’ve been painting your rocking chair to match the rest of the furniture in your room, so the kitchen had a giant plastic drop sheet taped to the floor. There were paint buckets and cans and washed out brushes littered about. That’s not to mention the dishes that have been piling up on the counter over the past few days.
She came in through the back door, right into the kitchen, right into the mess, right into my arms. She was trembling. I’ve never seen her so scared. Between gasps for breath she read from the notes she’d taken as she spoke to Dr. Stewart.
“The doctor said it’s more likely than not that things are fine,” she said.
Over the next few hours I got the rest of the details. The more I heard the better I felt, though the knot never really went away.
Later in the evening, after a bit of research, we learned that about 1 in 20 women has an abnormal result on her blood screening test, like your mother. The test can indeed indicate problems in fetal development, but only about 2 percent of the time — about the same rate at which you would randomly draw an Ace of Spades from a shuffled deck of cards.
Most often, there is another explanation.
Oftentimes, a positive test result simply indicates that the baby is a different gestational age that previously thought. That’s a likely scenario, we figure, since there’s been a bit of confusion at the doctor’s office about when to place your due date (currently, you’re expected to make your debut May 30, but at various times the doctor has also said June 6 and June 13.)
The test can also indicate twins or triplets (unlikely, in our case, since we only saw one of you when we had our emergency ultrasound last month.) And there’s also the possibility that the severe bleeding your mother had last month (which led to the ultrasound) has something to do with the result of the test.
Then, in some cases, there simply is no good explanation. In those cases, I figure, it’s best to just make one up.
“Maybe you ate some bad Chinese food that day,” I told your mom. “Or maybe you wore a hat that was too tight.”
Of course, I wish I’d known more about all of this when your mother first called this afternoon. Maybe I could have more quickly assuaged her fears.
And I probably could have saved my mother — your other grandmother — a lot of time, panic and prayer.
It probably didn’t hurt to get her involved, though. She’s got a pretty good line to God, not to mention a bunch of friends who also like to spend their time with their heads bowed. By sundown, you probably had dozens of people praying for you.
We’re unlikely to learn whether you are a boy or a girl, as we’d expected to, at tomorrow's appointment with Dr. Stewart. Instead, the doctor told your mom, we’ll spend some time talking about the test and what it all means.
We’ll do the ultrasound and an amniocentesis procedure on Wednesday. Hopefully then we’ll get to assign you a pronoun.
More importantly we’ll get to know you’re still happy, healthy and developing as you should be.
And maybe then the knot in my stomach will go away.
Love,
dad
P.S. A few of the questions we'll be asking Dr. Stewart tomorrow:
• What will you be looking for on the ultrasound?
• Is our baby at risk for other problems, in addition to Trisomy 18, based upon this result?
• How likely is it that this means our baby has superhuman stregth or X-ray vision?
4 comments:
Oh LaPlantes, I am so sorry. I'm guessing this was a result of the triple- or quad-marker screen? Let me see if I can do something to allay your fears. I have known no less than five women who popped a positive result on this test. They all spent the next few weeks in gut-wrenching terror, had their amnios, and every last one of them turned out to be absolutely fine and had perfectly healthy babies. As you know by now, the test you had done doesn't definitively tell you that there's something wrong with your baby; it only says there is a very, very small chance that something COULD be wrong, but more than likely there is NOTHING wrong. It's for this reason (and also that I am a blubbering stress ball under even the most ideal conditions) that we chose not to have the screen done.
The three of you are always in my prayers anyway, but I'm going to ramp it up a bit. Our church has a "prayer intentions" list to which I've added your family. At this very moment some very uptight Catholic woman is clutching her rosary beads and praying fervently for a favorable outcome to your situation.
Sorry for the marathon response. Chin up. A trite little quote I often like to tell myself... "Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it isn't the end."
Well, you were right about the prayer part. I was on my knees immediately and so were many others. Many thanks to all the others who are now praying for our grandchild.
I too, have had many people tell me that they or their sister, aunt, cousin or friend had the same result and everything was just fine. I too, was mildly relieved but the knot is still there and will be until we can count Spike's pink little fingers and toes.
You have all had quite a roller coaster ride over the last few months. I keep thinking about Matt said in his blog about a month ago. Something like "an ordinary, run of the mill.... day would be nice. See what you can do in there, Spike." DITTO!
Love Grandma L.
I will be praying for your family.
Oh, that dreaded quad screen!! I was a "victim" of a false positive just a few short months ago. Please keep in mind the numbers they use to generate a positive result. My chances of Down's syndrome, based on the screening were 1 in 109 and that was considered positive. That's LESS than a 1% chance, but because it was a higher chance than would be expected according to my age, my results was coded positive. After a few nerve wracking days, an amnio showed a healthy baby boy!
Best of luck! Oh, and ask for a Fisch test . . . full amnio results take about 14 days but a Fisch will come back in about 48 hours. It only gives info on chromosomes x and y, 3, 18, and 21, but that's what you're looking for anyway!!
Post a Comment