23 Weeks
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This week was our first visit to Perinatology (or the high-risk obstetrician). It was a long appointment – almost 4 whole hours, most of which was spent on doing ultrasound scans of Spot. Her anatomy all still looks good, but unfortunately, you can’t use an ultrasound to determine if she is small just because my family tends to have small babies, or if it’s because something is wrong.
That means a couple of different things. First, that I continue to go back bi-weekly for more scans to make sure that Spot is still growing. This is a big concern since she went from the 8th percentile at our regular OB appointment to the 5th percentile at this week’s appointment. I’m just going to assume that’s because the perinatology people have much fancier ultrasound machines.
She measured in at around 14oz, when we should be looking at an average of 1.01lbs, That’s around 3 oz too small, which doesn’t seem like much, but I guess it is when you’re that small to start with. Regardless, we get to do more scanning. Of course, the plus side of all this scanning is that I’ll get to see Spot a lot more than most people get to see their babies before they come out.
The other thing that Spot’s tiny size means is that we need to rule out some potential health risks. I gave up 30mL of blood, which will be used to test both for infection and potential abnormalities. We won’t know those results until sometime next week, so right now it’s just sit and wait. At this point, I’m going on faith that Spot is a perfectly healthy tiny baby. But if you have a prayer to spare, Spot and I would appreciate it.
This is probably not the place to ask, but why are you in the high-risk group? Age, or genetics?
My bestie had her first child at 37 and they treated it as a high-risk pregnancy, particularly as she carries the gene for trisomia (is that the word in English?) Her son is now 4 yo and is doing well. She just had Son No 2 and he is fine and free of the gene. Both were natural births instead of the C-sections she had been threatened with.
I will have a word. Jesus is on the job.
I wasn’t put into high risk until they did our anatomy scan last month. Apparently, when your baby falls below the 10th percentile for growth, they consider it a high-risk pregnancy because being that small can be caused by a number of genetic factors, such as Trisomy (I believe that is the same as your trisomia), or due to issues with how the placenta is passing nutrients back and forth to the baby.
I am happy to report that we got the genetic testing results yesterday afternoon and everything looks good there. I will still need to continue going to high-risk, as they will want to monitor Spot’s continued growth, but the news was all good yesterday.
Definitely keeping the Little Miss and you and Matt in our prayers. Faith and Prayer are powerful things! ❤️