A Great Relief from Great News

15 week ultra-sound from the high-risk doctor--the baby was jumping around like crazy!

Whew.  I hate the time between a doctor's visit and receiving test results; it's like time ticks slowly by, and when "Day 7" of "7-10 days for results" passes without a phone call, it's very easy to be convinced that no news is bad news.  Luckily for us, "Day 8's" phone call was well worth the extra 24 hours of agony!

My mother had a pregnancy condition called thrombocytopenia.  For each of her pregnancies, her body recognized the baby's blood as a foreign object and destroyed the baby's platelets. (It's very similar to Rhesus disease, just a lot rarer and often fatal for the babies due to hemorrhaging before and/or after birth.  In Rhesus, the mom and baby's blood "types" don't agree; in thrombocytopenia, the HPAs don't agree.)

I'm a researcher (knowledge comforts me, and I actually enjoy anything remotely academic), so when we were referred to a high-risk doctor because of this family history, I think the doctor was surprised that I knew a lot about the subject and had some slightly more in-depth questions.  After a long talk, Ryan and I submitted to a blood test and waited.

I haven't mentioned the potential of this disease publicly so far because there are a lot of nerve-wracking decisions and potential problems that would have come with a diagnosis, and as much as I've been dwelling on those issues internally, I just couldn't put them down on paper.  It's been a long two weeks, needless to say.

Then, the call finally came yesterday: No thrombocytopenia!  The nurse said they were going to review the test results for a second opinion today, and that they'd call if the second doctor had another interpretation. (I've never wanted a silent phone worse than today!) But, here it is, past business hours and we're free and clear.

Praise God!