Seriously.........you need to pick a position and stay there!

First of all let’s start at last Friday night…..no sooner I posted the last post about the baby being transverse, I started feeling him shift around.  Soon the shifting turned PAINFUL and I came to the conclusion he was flipping.  For about 2 hours I was seriously uncomfortable as he maneuvered his way into whatever position he was going for.  Luckily I had read online that if a baby is transverse at the point in pregnancy, like my baby was, it could feel like you were going into labor if they move into a completely different position.  So I didn’t completely freak out when I was in a good amount of pain and my stomach looked like something from the Alien movie.  It took the baby a good 2 hours to ‘move’ positions.  My stomach, which has stretch marks just from him flipping positions, was sore the rest of the weekend.  So it was hard for me to tell what kind of position he had flipped into.  Of course I was hoping for head down!

            Fast forward to my most recent round of appointments at the Fetal Care Institute this week.  We started with another Fetal Echo.  I convinced them to use the ultrasound machine to tell me if he was head down because I couldn’t stand the suspense…………..and HE WAS!  YIPEE!  So we now run the chance of having a normal deliver (hopefully) and he better NOT be thinking of getting out of that position.  I can’t take another 2 hour round of flipping.  OUCH!

            So back to the Fetal Echo – the actual function of the heart still looks very normal.  Good good good.  The negative – it appears the left side of the baby’s heart is somewhat small.  The doctor feels that it is small due to the position it is in and room it has to grow.  She didn’t feel, at this point, it was affecting the functionality of the heart.  Since the heart is growing in a different place, it may just have to grow a little differently.  But from the testing done, even though it is slightly misshapen, it seems to be working normally at this point.

            Following the Echo we had another upper level ultrasound.  This is where things get interesting.  The bigger the baby gets, the more difficult it is to get a clear image of his organs.  I had trouble spotting things that I have become accustom to seeing on a regular basis!  And some of the organs I was hoping to see, like the left lung, we could not see at all.  The docs told me it is not necessarily because it is not there; it is because it becomes increasingly more difficult to see from this point on.  So it is somewhat of a guessing game.  The baby is weighing in at a whopping 5lbs. 4oz.

            Both Dr. Yang and Dr. Vlastos still give us a positive vibe about the outlook of our baby.  He has come a LONG way over the past 8 months.  I am just now entering the 9^th month of pregnancy.  Ye Haw to that.  This has been the easy part I guess.  The hard part begins once he is born. It appears that all CDH babies go on what is best described as a roller-coaster after birth.  They have a honeymoon period after birth where they are lookin good.  Then things will go way up and way down.  You just have to hope that your baby pulls through and back into the unloading zone of the roller-coaster.  I guess where you would “get off the ride” equals getting to take your baby home.  Which is ultimately what EVERY CDH PARENT HOPES FOR, as only 50% get to do it. 

            I have been following several other blogs of CDH parents who are due close to me.   Several of them have had their babies.  Some of the babies are still in the NICU fighting the CDH battle, while others joined the other CDH cherubs in heaven over the past several weeks.  My thoughts and prayers go out to each of those families – both those who are sitting day after day with their babies in the NICU hoping for a miracle and those who are grieving the loss of their miracle.  I feel every baby is a miracle, no matter how long they are with us.  I know soon I will be in their shoes.  I have tried to prepare myself the best I can for it.  But you can only do so much when you are on my end.  The rest depends on the miracle coming into this world on or around April 26^th.