It's a "B"
I stood in the kitchen, before departing on the 100 mile round trip for yesterday's ultrasound, and concentrated on my ambiguous, mediocre pregnancy symptoms, and thought, "This is going to be a "b" on my options list. This is going to be a mediocre, ambiguous ultrasound."
And I was right.
So: the good news is, it wasn't a "c". No molar pregnancy, no ectopic pregnancy, and there was a gestational sac in the uterus, so I am pregnant. There was a 9 mm gestational sac, and an appropriately sized yolk sac off to one edge, and what the ultrasonographer called "appropriately heterogenous endometrium" - apparently the endometrium has a characteristic sort of busy, mottled look in early pregnancy, which then clarifies and clears later on, and this looked active and busy and just like she wanted it to for a 5-6 week pregnancy.
But there wasn't a clearly visible fetal pole, although there was a pulsing on one edge of the yolk sac that could be where a heartbeat is going to be soon, but not necessarily. And at just on 6 weeks, you would normally expect to see a clear fetal pole, and possibly a heartbeat. Also, the gestational sac, which grows 1 mm a day at this stage in pregnancy, should be well over a centimetre in diameter by now, to be typical.
So the technician thinks this is a completely normal pregnancy about 4 days behind where I think it is, and that either my dates are wrong (but they aren't, they aren't) or that implantation etc was a bit slower than average for some reason. She says that nothing about the scan makes her suspect that there's anything wrong with it. And when I got home, I googled gestational sac sizes and so forth, and it's true that everything I saw yesterday is within the normal range for 6w 1d after LMP. So it could all be fine, and just a bit lethargic to get going. What's more,the first pregnancy test I did was only weakly positive, which would go with slow implantation etc, and so the "normal" explanation has appealing backup, too.
But somehow, I don't think so. I think this is going to be a re-run of last year's missed miscarriage. Maybe these are just nasty wrinkled old eggs. Maybe we have some horrid chromosomal issue, and were lucky to have two normal pregnancies when I conceived the girls, and this is not just a function of age. Who knows? Apparently only 10% of pregnancies fail after seeing a yolk sac, but then 50% of pregnancies at age 42 end in miscarriage, so I could play with these statistics endlessly, and pointlessly.
It's a good job that I have that NHS scan on the horizon. I don't think my pregnancy symptoms are nearly powerful enough for this to be a viable pregnancy. If coffee avoidance and nausea are linearly related to HCG levels for me, which I sort of feel is the case, then I would put good money on having HCG levels that are well above zero, but far below where they should be. I think a miscarriage lies in my not too distant future.
Even so, I don't regret going through all this again. For me, this will be it. I am not putting myself through this a third time, at the age of rising 43. But I do have much better closure on the whole subject as a result of this final effort. I will work through it, doing whatever I need to, and I will close the door on this part of my life, and move on.
It's always going to suck, though.
And I was right.
So: the good news is, it wasn't a "c". No molar pregnancy, no ectopic pregnancy, and there was a gestational sac in the uterus, so I am pregnant. There was a 9 mm gestational sac, and an appropriately sized yolk sac off to one edge, and what the ultrasonographer called "appropriately heterogenous endometrium" - apparently the endometrium has a characteristic sort of busy, mottled look in early pregnancy, which then clarifies and clears later on, and this looked active and busy and just like she wanted it to for a 5-6 week pregnancy.
But there wasn't a clearly visible fetal pole, although there was a pulsing on one edge of the yolk sac that could be where a heartbeat is going to be soon, but not necessarily. And at just on 6 weeks, you would normally expect to see a clear fetal pole, and possibly a heartbeat. Also, the gestational sac, which grows 1 mm a day at this stage in pregnancy, should be well over a centimetre in diameter by now, to be typical.
So the technician thinks this is a completely normal pregnancy about 4 days behind where I think it is, and that either my dates are wrong (but they aren't, they aren't) or that implantation etc was a bit slower than average for some reason. She says that nothing about the scan makes her suspect that there's anything wrong with it. And when I got home, I googled gestational sac sizes and so forth, and it's true that everything I saw yesterday is within the normal range for 6w 1d after LMP. So it could all be fine, and just a bit lethargic to get going. What's more,the first pregnancy test I did was only weakly positive, which would go with slow implantation etc, and so the "normal" explanation has appealing backup, too.
But somehow, I don't think so. I think this is going to be a re-run of last year's missed miscarriage. Maybe these are just nasty wrinkled old eggs. Maybe we have some horrid chromosomal issue, and were lucky to have two normal pregnancies when I conceived the girls, and this is not just a function of age. Who knows? Apparently only 10% of pregnancies fail after seeing a yolk sac, but then 50% of pregnancies at age 42 end in miscarriage, so I could play with these statistics endlessly, and pointlessly.
It's a good job that I have that NHS scan on the horizon. I don't think my pregnancy symptoms are nearly powerful enough for this to be a viable pregnancy. If coffee avoidance and nausea are linearly related to HCG levels for me, which I sort of feel is the case, then I would put good money on having HCG levels that are well above zero, but far below where they should be. I think a miscarriage lies in my not too distant future.
Even so, I don't regret going through all this again. For me, this will be it. I am not putting myself through this a third time, at the age of rising 43. But I do have much better closure on the whole subject as a result of this final effort. I will work through it, doing whatever I need to, and I will close the door on this part of my life, and move on.
It's always going to suck, though.
posted by Alison at
6:17 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home