Jasmin and Frank's
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Bendy Baby |
| Posted on July 12, 2011 |
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I had my repeat scan today followed by an appointment with Dr. Johnson. At my scan, Dr. Jenzen was taking a look this time. After talking a bit she realized she was on staff when I was in the hospital with Blue. She was not on my case, but I was discussed at the resident Grand Rounds (where residents presents and discuss the most interesting/difficult cases). I'm not surprised I made it to Grand Rounds. While preeclampsia occurs in 5-7% of all pregnancies, the type of preeclampsia and the classification of HELLP I had was the rarest, occurring in 0.2-0.6% of all pregnancies. Dr. Jenzen took a second look at Snowflake's brain, heart, and other things Dr. Khan was unable to identify because of how uncooperative he was at the time. All of these were easier for Dr. Jenzen to see Snowflake's insides, because he is snow much bigger. He is now 1 lb 9oz. If you recall, last Thursday (just 4 days ago), he was 1 lb 5 oz. I asked her about checking for the echogenic bowel. She agreed there was echogenic bowel present. It is a marker for genetic and/or infectious disease problems. She said my blood work showed Snowflake's chances of having Down's is 1 in 8,000. The presence of echogenic bowel increases our chances to 1 in 4,000. The chances are in our favor. When trying to get a picture of Snowflake's face, he stopped cooperating. It was like he knew what we were trying to do. While he was camera shy about showing his face, he had no problems showing us his boy parts...many times! In the end, she wasn't sure she could get a good picture. But then she was able to finally get a shot of the side of his face...complete with his hand over his face, and foot on his forehead. He is a limber baby. I then saw Dr. Johnson after and he discussed echogenic bowel further with me. He said the first explanation for echogenic bowel is improvements in ultrasound technology. EB is a "soft marker" as he descibes it. Soft markers are typically founded in teaching institutions where they see an anomaly, and notate certain correlations. So while there may be a relationship between EB and a bunch of nasty things that can happen to baby, risk is relatively low. He also spoke to Dr. Tabsh, who was there that day. Dr. Johnson says he was not terribly concerned about something bad. He just wants to keep an eye out for medical "zebras," as they are called. Zebras are equivalent to outliers. Looking at my history, it's no wonder. Genetic problems are lower on the list. I tested negative for Cystic Fibrosis when I first got pregnant. They want to check Frank for the genetic trait as well. He will get tested this week. CF is also a common diagnosis in the presence of EB. But again, the risk is low that Snowflake will have anything like that. Since genetic problems are somewhat clear, the question now is infection. Dr. Johnson said he has personally yet to see a congenital infection in his career. So they will do blood tests on me to check for infections. But again, they are expecting things to be negative. As Dr. Johnson said, we seem to be cruising through. Let's hope it keeps going at this pace. |