what the ultrasound showed

catherine-

hey sweet girl=) you are quiet right now-must be sleeping. do you know how happy it makes me when you flip flop around in there? i sit there and stare at my belly, watching it morph into weird shapes, laughing as you punch my bladder=) you are precious and perfect and i love you so much. your daddy makes me lay certain ways at night so he can get his hands on you too-i feel sorry for him, you know…i always ask him if he’s jealous that i get to carry you around in my belly for 9 months and he doesn’t. he always says no he’s not really jealous, which i guess is the answer i would think is appropriate…it would be weird, huh? if he said he wished he could carry you around in his belly and be pregnant??? i still can’t help but ask-i can’t believe how lucky i feel to have you inside me and i just figure everyone else is jealous=) you have the best daddy though-can you tell that from in there? he can’t wait to meet you. i feel bittersweet as the pregnancy progresses and it gets closer and closer to september 4-i want to keep you in here as long as i can-maybe it’s part of my control issues (your mommy has control issues!)-but i just know you’re safe now and while you’re in there you don’t need those silly lungs which might not be growing like they should. do you know what i’m talking about? i always wonder if you have any idea that something’s wrong inside your sweet little body.

on april 2, at 17 weeks and 6 days pregnant, we got great news! it was a sweet little girl growing inside of me and we would get to buy lots of pink and frilly things! but we also got some very sad news. on the same ultrasound we saw that your heart was on the wrong side of your body, and that your stomach was up in your chest next to your heart. this means you have a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. silly diaphragm not closing like it should…there is a chance more things in your belly could slide up there into your chest, but that’s actually not the biggest problem-that could be fixed with surgery pretty easily once you get out here and meet us. the problem is that your heart is now taking up the right side of your chest and your stomach is taking up the left side of your chest, and your lungs might not ever have a chance to grow without anything in their way. this could cause congestive heart failure and pulmonary hypertension and all kinds of things, but the point is that your lungs might not be able to work at all when you’re out here in the world. we were told that it could be linked to chromosome abnormalities, so they immediately did an amniocentesis-do you know what that is? they stuck a huge needle down into mommy’s belly next to where you are-they watched it on the ultrasound to make sure they weren’t going to poke you-and they took out some amniotic fluid and ran some tests on it. we got to see all your chromosomes! and we also saw that all of them were normal=) that means you don’t have any other syndromes, like down’s syndrome or trisomy 18…nothing like that. good news for sure, but it didn’t really change the prognosis…i guess it was just good to know that, however long your sweet little life is, there won’t be any other problems like that for you. it also means that any little brothers and sisters you have one day don’t have any increased risk for defects or chromosomal abnormalities. i can’t wait to tell them about you-of course i hope they just get to meet you themselves, but just in case you get to go to heaven quickly, we’ve been collecting tons of ultrasound pictures of you (we have an ultrasound every 4 weeks since officially you and i are high risk now), we’ll get some pictures of daddy and me with you in my big belly, and then we’ll make sure we get pictures of you once you come out-however long we get you=)

i love you my sweet girl-

mommy