halloween fun

I am happy to report that Luke Skywalker and Frog (of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Books) are out gathering candy as we speak! Smart baby wanted his pumpkin to look like Grover and Smart son designed his with multiple sets of triangle eyes. Unfortunately it has been a busy week and the carving was slated for down to the wire slot of after school today- I refused to wield a sharp knife due to my highly anti coagulated state- and did not want to risk any life threatening injuries- so I had to craft this years mediocre jack-o-lanterns with a dull pumpkin carver (yes these are what we let children use in preschool to cut up bits of fruit) I also think i have carpal tunnel from the excessive repetitive sawing motion!

on the baby front

Well I haven't posted in a while because things have been a little crazy. While i was in for 31 wk ultrasound (Which they do because of my thrombophilia- to ensure the placental perfusion is good and baby is growing well) they found a really really rare cord issue- An intra-abdominal vein varix- basically after the umbilical vein enters the baby- it is dilated within the abdominal cavity of the baby. I noticed the U/s tech kept looking at something but i couldn't figure out what is was. Well the perinatalogist came in and explained it and said she thought i needed to have weekly NSTs and we needed to move up my next ultrasound. Well I went home and started reading-- Unfortunately reading up on it only made things scarier. The first thing I learned was one it was really rare- There are less than 100 cases documented. Each study maybe only included 7-9 patients.Then of those cases documented outcomes varied widely. Some showed really good outcomes 7 out of 7 healthy babies- other showed stillbirth and fetal loss rates of 25-44%. the problem that frequently occurs is thrombosis of the vessel- not what you want to hear when you are already high risk for thrombosis (I'm on lovenox 2x a day and aspirin)That was definitely not what I wanted to hear. Especially after all I have been through ( 8 m/cs) I called the perinatalogist back the next morning, got kicked over to high risk for my managment and we came up with a new plan- 2x a week Bpps,Nsts, doppler studies, we did steriods to speed lung development, and we are due an amnio to check lung maturity on the 12th and assuming we're good- baby will be induced then at 35 weeks- So I have to keep this baby hanging in for 11 more days and then we won't take any risks.We are hoping with our careful monitoring we could catch a "problem" before it happens but again there is enough to know who things play out when they go bad. So we are hoping we don't have to deal with that- needless to say I live hour to hour and day to day and appt to appt- poking and prodding this little boy to ensure he is always moving and dopplering him a few times a day. But there is nothing like need to be ready for the baby- so i am trying to not stress myself out- but also expedite things and get in gear. So keep your fingers crossed!