The Good, the Bad and the Cute.

Wow. The u/s was over an hour long! The periontologist came in and she asked me if she could practice some new techniques she learned in a class last week. Fine by me! So I did get to see things I never saw before (like a 4d of a beating heart and blood movement through ventricles, etc) but it was all really technical so definitely over my head. But without further ado, the updates:

The Good: Baby is measuring perfectly. All parts intact and in all the right places. Functioning heart, kidneys and bladder. Working mouth, throat, tummy. And he definitely had a penis. Oh, and big feet. I found that funny. So for the anatomy scan, ~all~ was well. Yay!

The Bad: The cord was still definitely velamentous. Quick explanation: The plactenta is shaped like a disc and a perfect cord insertion would be right in the middle. In my case, the cord goes through the bag of waters and attaches about 2cm from the end of the placenta and then transverses (goes in sideways) to the middle of the placenta.

This causes some concerns. The first concern is it could restrict growth due to decreased blood flow. This happens in about 5% of VCI cases. The Dr ordered growth scans every 6 weeks, with my next one at 24 weeks. The second concern is much, much scarier. Due to the cord not being as mobile in the section it transverses the placenta, as the baby gets bigger, the baby can roll over on it and compress it enough to cause the blood flow to stop, literally killing himself, resulting in a stillbirth. This happens in about 1% of cases. The Dr has ordered tests to watch the heartrate twice a week starting at 32 weeks. If they can tell the baby ~is~ actively compressing the cord enough to see it on the test, they'll take the baby early. She said these tests won't take the risk down to zero, as they can't monitor me 24 hours a day and a freak accident can always happen. Ugh. So this is scary. You better believe I'll be listening to the baby via doppler a lot in 3rd tri. Oh, and the cord inserts on the right side, so as I get bigger, no right side sleeping!

The Cute: We got some cute ultrasound pictures. I did get the money shot (even though we already knew he was a boy) and some other profiles, but those are always hard to point out. I don't have a scanner here at work, so these are pictures of pictures. Crappy quality, but you can still see him.


This is my favorite. He's looking straight at us, eyes closed. On the bottom of the picture, a little to the left, you can see his shoulder and his arm and elbow really well, and his hand is nestled up on the right side of picture, covering the left side of his face. You can see his right eye, little nose and lips really really well.


This one is almost the same as the first, but he turned and covered the other side of his face with his hand. Now the left eye is visible and his hand is curled up in front of his face, with the other hand under his chin.


This one ~is~ creepy, but funny enough to post. The entire topf of his face/head gets distorted due to his arms, but he opened his mouth and looks like he's smiling. Heh.