Mind you, I have had fairly lazy mornings the last few days, and it's always worse when I have to rush around.
I just realised I never wrote a proper update about our scan.
Well - we went up to the hospital to see the fetal medicine team. It's always nice to walk in and be greeted by the consultant with a hug and a kiss!
I feel so privileged to have such a wonderful team around me - it makes me more confident that we'll deal with anything that's thrown at us.
So.
I had a scan. I lay on the table and chatted with the sonographer, but as soon as she put the gel on my tummy, I started to cry.
It was the most enormous rush of emotions - fear that she might tell us that the baby didn't have a heartbeat, and blind terror - if there WAS a heartbeat - at the journey we are starting out on.
Anyway, I pulled myself together and looked at the screen, where LO was wriggling around happily. We could see the little arms waving and the tiny legs pumping.
As I said in the last post, I was right about being a bit further on than my initial dates had predicted - the scan put me forward by three days.
In a stupid way, I found this reassuring. With both Will and the miscarriage, my dates were pushed back by a week, so that would have felt like a very bad sign. Plus, Charlie was exactly where my dates said he should be, so it was nice for this baby to be totally different in that respect. (Not that it makes any difference really, but it made me feel better!)
They said the baby looked great, and totally normal for this stage. They also had a look at the yolk sac, which apparently looked very good too.
After the scan, they did my booking appointment, so there's no need for me to go to the GP - all my care will be under the fetal medicine department.
I had my bloods done, and my blood pressure (which, by some miracle, was very good at 106/64)
Then we saw the consultant, Bryan Beattie. He was very positive, which was nice. We've known him for years now, and he always tells us exactly how it is. He knows I work best with a 'just tell me everything' approach.
We told him we were inclined to have no more scans until 20 weeks, because we didn't think that we would be able to learn anything useful until then.
However, he was very keen for us to go back in a couple of weeks for a nuchal fold scan.
This was only just coming into its own when I had the boys, and was for determining the risk of Down's Syndrome, and has to be done between about 11 and 13wks. We never bothered with it before, because a Down's diagnosis wouldn't have changed anything for us anyway.
But apparently, in recent years, it has been discovered that a thickened nuchal fold can also signify whether a baby is likely to have a major cardiac defect AND, as I later discovered, Meckel Gruber syndrome. Plus, some of the physical signs of Meckel Gruber would possibly be visible by then on ultrasound.
So, although we won't know definitively at the 12 week scan, we will have a jolly good idea of which way the wind is blowing.
The plan is to have the scan at 12w2d (March 22) and if the nuchal fold looks good, Mr Beattie is confident enough to leave any further scans until 20wks, when we would have the standard anomaly scan. We would then follow that up with a detailed cardiac scan at 24wks.
If, however, the nuchal fold is thickened, we will have another scan at about 14wks to see what's going on.
It feels good to have a plan in place.
Before we left, I showed Mr Beattie the scan pictures we were given. To be honest, I wasn't expecting him to look at them in a diagnostic light - I was just showing off LO's first portrait!
But one of the pictures showed a clear side-on picture of LO, with a clear shot of the nuchal fold.
He showed me how to identify the fold, and said: 'It's a bit early to assess it, but that, to me, looks like a very small one.'
I found that comment so reassuring - firstly, there was no need for him to point out the nuchal fold at all, and secondly, I can't imagine he would have mentioned it if the nuchal fold was likely to suddenly balloon over the ensuing two weeks, and if a small nuchal fold now has no bearing at all on how it might look in a fortnight.
Needless to say, I came home and started Googling images of nuchal folds, and it does look pretty good so far!
So, for the moment, things are looking as good as they possibly can.
I'm feeling more optimistic than I ever have before.
Foolish, probably, but what's the point in hoping and praying for something to happen, if you don't believe it ever will?
I know it's a bit daft, but we've always said to Charlie that if we see a rainbow, it means Will is saying hello. Then, a couple of days after Dad died, we saw the most amazing double rainbow, and Chas said 'Look - it's Will AND Grandpa saying hello!'
So rainbows always make us think of them and smile.
Anyway, as we left the hospital, we were walking down the stairs, and there, projected onto the floor at our feet were two rainbows.
I have no idea what the sun was shining through to make them, but they were there - bright and beautiful.
I know, scientifically, it has no bearing on anything at all - but those two little splashes of colour felt like a hug.
Sent from my iPhone
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