Part one: No heartbeat.
We went for our ultrasound Thursday afternoon. We weren't sure if E was going to make it in time for the appointment because of crazy traffic, but thankfully the office was running a bit behind. E arrived (thank God) about two minutes before the called me back. Phew!
The next 6 or so minutes were 100% a roller coaster. We started with an abdominal ultrasound and for the first time ever, we saw the sac and we saw the baby! To make things even better the sac looked GREAT! Definitely not a normal size sac, but there was substantially more fluid around baby. Woohoo! I didn't see a flicker but assumed it was because it was an abdominal ultrasound. The tech said that she thought there was a heartbeat but wanted to do a vaginal ultrasound to confirm.
I think I got undressed faster than I ever had in my life and then we had to wait for her to come back. It felt like forever. She came back in and we got started again. She was very quiet and I still didn't think that I saw a flicker. Then she said it. "Guys, I'm so sorry but I have bad news. There's no heartbeat." She showed us with the feature that shows movement that there was in fact no movement of the baby and no heart beating. She left us for a few minutes and to also run over to my doctor's office to see what they wanted me to do.
E and I just sat there, stunned. We couldn't believe it. We knew that there was a very large chance that this was going to happen, but we were still in shock.
When the tech came back, she ushered us to the doctors office. Thankfully it was 5pm by now so the building was pretty empty and there weren't too many people to see my tear streaked face.
We first spoke with Ellen for a little while and she gave us a kit in the even that I started to miscarry naturally before the D&C. She didn't think that it would happen considering that the sac was still growing, but gave it to us just in case. She left to find Dr. M and to get someone started on scheduling the surgery.
When Dr. M came in, she, as always, was so caring and compassionate and even had tears in her eyes. Not that I want anyone else to feel our pain, but it's nice to see how much she cares. We got surgery scheduled for Friday. She was to be in the office all day and couldn't be there until 5pm but considering that it would be her doing the surgery, we were more than willing to wait it out.
We started discussing our options from that point and put a small game plan together:
- She wanted E to go in Friday morning for blood work to look for chromosomal issues.
- We obviously would get the baby from the D&C and would do testing on the baby to see if there were any chromosomal issues.
- She said at this point she thinks it would be best to see a reproductive specialist. E and I had already discussed that we wanted to if this pregnancy didn't work out, and she is obviously on board with that. She said that we would try to do as much testing as we could so she can give them the information and they can just come up with a game plan rather than having to prolong things even more.
- She decided to also do a diagnostic hysteroscopy during the D&C to look at the shape and formation of my uterus and see if there was a septum.
- At this point she admitted to us that she thinks there may be some kind of chromosomal issue and we may have difficulty having children of our own. At that point I still listened and shook my head but didn't really take anything in. That whole "in one ear and out the other"? Yeah that's what happened. She mentioned IVF at one point but I couldn't tell you if she said it was or wasn't a possibility for us.
E and I went home, ate dinner, had a glass of wine and I went to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment