The factory is silent. Its assembly line stands motionless. Somewhere off in the darkness, a buzzer sounds. One by one, lights begin to flicker and illuminate on long-unmanned diagnostic panels, giving a sense of enormity and complexity and scale to the machinery. The low hum of power supplies warming up comes next, followed by the higher and louder whine of turbines and electric motors. A whistle sounds, and one by one, employees begin to file in and take their places at the controls. Purposed for a single task, whose time has now come, the factory slowly comes to life...

Friday, February 13, 2009

Test Results and Halfway There!


Just a quick update because there are two things I forgot to mention...

First, I'm 20 weeks this week! That's the halfway mark! I can't believe it's half over already, but at the same time it seems like there's so much further to go. Maybe it's because the first month or so doesn't even "count." I mean, they start week 1 at the first day of your last menstrual period, so that's like...nothing. Then you don't ovulate for another 10-14 days, and then the baby actually has to be conceived. By the time you're taking the pregnancy test, it's already week 4 -- a month has gone by without you even noticing!

I'm feeling patterns of movement now from baby girl, after I eat, or sometimes when I wake up in the night. Midnight and 7 am are about the only times I've been able to clock though. She has regular spots in which she likes to push me -- right front and center on my abdomen, or very often on the lower right. I can barely feel her from the outside, sometimes, but as soon as Craig tries, she stops moving!

The second thing I forgot to mention was that we got our genetic screen results back, and they are good.

No genetic marker for cystic fibrosis.

The statistical risk for a woman my age for Down syndrome is 1 in 155. Our results came back as a risk of 1 in 190. Therefore the risk is lower than that of just a woman my age. This is good news to me.

The risk of trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome, much more devastating) is 1 in 600-something. So that's a risk I'm not even going to worry about at this point.

Combined with the good results (so far) of our big ultrasound, the doctor's office saw no need for us to go through further, more intensive screening, and neither do we. Good news indeed!
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