Yesterday I was a pretty big grump. It was one of those days where everything was going wrong and making me more and more upset as time passed. Friends, Family, Work, just everything. Marc came home and talked to me for a while and told me to quit worrying about things, that if I were not prego I would not even be thinking twice about these things that had me all fired up. Of course being in the mood I was in, I thought he just can't relate. You are all probably wondering why I am writing about a bad morning/afternoon I had yesterday. Well... it all hit home today when I was talking to a co-worker about our unborn baby girls. His wife is due in March. We were talking about names, setting up the nursery ect.. He randomly asked me if I had heard the talk from David A. Bednar in 2006. I can't remember what we had for dinner Tuesday night, so of course I said no. He sent me this link. It was a talk titled "And nothing shall offend them" As I read this talk one paragraph stood out to me...
"It ultimately is impossible for another person to offend you or to offend me. Indeed, believing that another person offended us is fundamentally false. To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else."
Can you say wowza... this co-worker that I rarely talk to just happened to be reading this today and sent it to me. It was EXACTLY what I needed to hear. All the sudden I realized everything I had been upset about yesterday was because of my choice to be upset. So, I am writing about it because I don't want to forget it. I am sure this is something that will help me through many, many situations in my life. AND... who knows, maybe it will help someone else today too!
On another note... I am so excited to go to San Diego with Marc tomorrow!. I just love his break times and seeing him be able to let loose and have fun instead of have to study all the time. He really deserves it from all the hard work he puts in. I know he is thrilled to spend the holidays down there with his family and friends and that makes me even more excited!. Now, I need to go pop some Martinilli's in the freezer so we can celebrate the end of Quarter #5 when Marc gets home.
Well, we have had kind of a crazy few days in our house. Not only has Marc started Quarter 5 finals & started studying for boards, but we also had a few baby scares. This is going to be a REALLY long post, but tells the story from start to finish.
It all started Sunday night. We had done everything just as normal as we do every other day, I went in to get ready for bed around 10:30 & took my prenatal's just before hitting my pillow and Marc was in the study hitting the books. For the first few hours I kept waking up tossing and turning, almost like I couldn't get my belly comfortable. Around 2:00am I woke up with this incredible pain in my upper stomach. I can't put into words what it felt like, but just know it hurt like CrAzY. I woke up and drank some water. A few minutes later Marc just happened to come in for bed. Of course he was shocked to see me awake and asked what was wrong, I told him my stomach was really hurting and the only thing I could think was maybe I didn't have enough food in my stomach before taking my prenatal's. Marc got me some tums, but they were not helping so I eventually decided to go in the kitchen and eat a piece of bread, thinking maybe that would help. Marc fell asleep before I even got back to the bedroom from eating the bread. I knew he was SO tired with all the studying he had been doing, so I didn't wake him up. I tried doing everything I could think of to get rid of this pain which kept increasing. I started doing laps around our house, put my arms above my head, hunched over the couch in a ball, googled upper stomach pain. Everything you can think of, I tried. Around 3:30 in the morning I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't want to go to the ER because 1) our deductible is ridiculously high and 2) I couldn't even describe the pain very well. So I resorted to plan B, I called the Kanab Hospital to see if my Aunt Teresa was working. I knew if she was working she'd be awake and would be able to tell me if I needed to go to the doc or not, but of course with my luck she didn't come in till the next morning. So I called my mom and woke her up. I asked her if she ever had the pain and described it the best I could. After a long time of talking she suggested I get two wash cloths one hot and one cold and put both on my stomach one after another. The hot wash cloth actually helped a little, It would dull the pain just enough to let me fall back asleep for about 20 minutes before waking up with the pain back again. Each time I woke up it was different than before. Sometimes it lead down in to my lower belly & sometimes up into my chest, but was consistently on my right upper stomach between my rib and my xiphoid process. There were multiple times I felt like I was running out of air and would make sure I grabbed Marc's arm in case I couldn't speak to get his attention. Around 6:45am I woke up with the pain the worst. It was in my chest, my stomach and now in my back just to the center of my shoulder blade. I couldn't breath very well. I thought Marc will be up any sec and he will be able to tell me what is happening, but he was out cold. I got up and was sitting in a chair in our room just waiting for him to wake up and trying to take slow deep breaths, but finally gave in and called the doctors office. I got an answering machine that said they opened at 8, so I got up and got dressed then woke up Marc to take me in. We got there at 8:12 and their door said they didn't open till 8:30 (of course right?) Well they are amazing and took me right in. By this time my pain had gone from an 8 to a 3. That's what always happens right, as soon as you decide to get help it starts to go away. Well, they still did a full exam. She did 2 different ultrasounds and then a physical check. She said the baby seemed to be fine, but thought the pain could have been caused by a few different things so she sent us straight to the hospital to get priority labs. She also said that she wanted me to stay in bed taking it easy until she got the labs back. Before we left, she told us she was glad we came in because she had something she wanted to tell us about our last ultrasound, but didn't want to tell us over the phone because she didn't want us to panic. (Like hearing that she wanted to tell us in person is going to calm me down right?) Anyways, at our last ultrasound they found a Choroid Plexus Cyst on the baby's brain. Chroid Plexus Cysts are most strongly associated with Trisomy 18. If you are like me at all I had NO idea what that meant, but figured it wasn't good since she didn't dare tell us over the phone.. I will explain more about what it is when i tell you about the appointment with the specialist. So anyways, she said she wanted to get us in right away to a ultrasound specialist to have them look at this cyst on the baby's brain. So my job was to get to the hospital, get my labs done, schedule the appointment & get in bed. By the time we got home the ultrasound specialist office had called me to get me in first thing the next morning. We scheduled the appointment, Marc left for school and I fell right asleep. Well, Dr. Eckland finally called back with my lab results. She said she was happy because it wasn't the two things she thought, but that the blood work did show I had anemia. She couldn't explain the pain in my upper stomach, but said that if it happened again she wanted me to call her on-call number right away. So... onto the ultrasound appointment with the specialist. I know I am going to totally butcher the medical terminology of all this, but this is the dumbed down version I can understand/explain. When I first got there they called me in to explain what they were looking for and why they were concerned. They said that this specific cyst is double checked because it is linked to the Trisomy 18. Tri-18 is a chromosomal defect. I believe (from my understanding) it is similar to down syndrome, but has more medical complications. Again, I could totally be butchering what Tri-18 is, but she told me that most babies that have Tri-18 don't make it out of the womb and if they do they will typically die within the first year. So because the other doctor had seen this cyst on the brain, they needed to check and see if the baby had signs pointing to this Tri-18, if the cyst was causing cleft palate or if the cyst was gone all together. She told me that any pregnant woman's chances of having this Tri-18 is 1 in 100,000. Having spotted this cyst in the previous ultrasound that took our chances of having Tri-18 to 1 in 10,000. If she saw it again today that would take our chances to 1-100 which is really bad. So then they took me back to do the ultrasound. The first guy that came in did all kinda of pictures. He reminded me of the doctor on back to the future. Kinda a weirdie, but I was a fan of him because he gave me a mirror to be able to see the screen he was looking at. At one point you could see the baby moving all around. I asked him if the baby was moving and he said yes, just not the way he wanted her to. He was trying to get her femur measurement so he took the ultrasound stick and jabbed my stomach 3 times trying to get her to move right and **wham** she kicked back right where he just jabbed. I saw it on the screen and felt it. It was pretty dang funny. Like leave me the heck alone dude. haha!. Anyways he told me that he didn't see the cyst anymore, but that he wanted to pull in another doctor to confirm. Then Dr. Aziz came in, she did all kinds of pictures too. Almost exactly what he had just done, just in more detail. She explained everything along the way zooming right in on every little detail of the baby to confirm that it didn't have the cyst anymore, Tri-18 or cleft palate. She also confirmed that she didn't see signs of any of them. That our baby is beautiful & growing perfect. She was so zoomed in on her face you could see her scratch her cheek with her little fingers. It was WAY cool. She said that the doctor before could have seen a cyst & it could have just naturally gone away, but that she my have also just thought she saw something and wanted to have it double checked. Either way, they didn't see anything now. So our odds at this time are 1-10,000. Not the 1-100,000 we would have hoped for, but not the 1-100 I was worried about. So, now we are back home. No more stomach pains, back to finals and loads of beautiful pictures of our little baby girl. We have follow up appointments next week, but as of now... things are as good as we could have hoped for. Here are some of the ultrasound pictures they gave me today....
Baby's face.
Baby from the side.
Baby's nose & mouth. Look at those luscious lips!!
I seriously can't get enough of her big lips!. SO cute!!
Baby's face, side view. I think it's crazy that you can see her tongue go way back.
