AH HAH! I knew there was a catch.

Well, we can’t just do this whole pregnancy thing the easy way with NO problematic test results, now can we?! The good news? The bad news doesn’t seem like a cause to panic. At least not yet. And maybe not at all. Here’s the deal:

My bloodwork came back today from Thursday’s wonderful appointment. The risk of Downs and Trisomy are really low. That’s good. There is another marker that they check for if you have the 12 week scan done. (If you don’t have the 12 week scan, it’s never checked.) It’s called PAPP-A protein. They want your number to fall in the average range, or around 50%. So, for example, 30-70% would all be considered normal, because its rare to be EXACTLY average. Well, wouldn’t you just know it. I don’t settle for average. I shoot for the stars. My number is lower than 97.5% of women who have the test done…and since this isn’t golf, its not so good to have a low number. So. What does this mean? Hopefully NOT A DARN THING. But don’t Google it. I beg of you. Because the list of things that could go wrong is long and quite mean. I asked the computer to no longer speak to me that way.

All the things that could go wrong are third trimester bad things all having to do with the placenta and the baby’s ability to grow and thrive that late in pregnancy. Is this a way of getting me to think past 18 weeks?

So what are they going to do? Right now, nothing. We’re going to wait and cross all of our fingers and toes. Then we’ll have the BIG ultrasound done between 20-22 weeks, just like all those average folks. The difference is that after that, I’m going to need to have another BIG ultrasound done later on in my pregnancy, just to check. This will mean I get to be declared high risk (there’s a joke there…but I can’t quite find it right now…) and I become a real fun “new patient” in GA when we move. I’ll need to find a regular OB and a high risk OB in GA. I guess it’s a good way to get people to know my name quickly in a new place.

I love our OB here. She’s wonderful. So today I looked at her and said, “You’d tell me if I should panic or really get started worrying, right?” She said she would. “And this is NOT the time to panic, right?” She said it wasn’t. So we’re NOT panicking. We’re going to get to see the baby a few more times before he/she is born, and that’s a good thing. And ultimately the sentence, “We won’t really worry about it until the baby is viable.” was said today. And somehow, to us, that was strangely comforting.

If you’re the praying kind, we could use prayers that there is no reason to worry about baby’s development and ability to stay comfortable until he/she is full term and also that his/her mommy and daddy are able to stay calm  less worried until doctors can confirm that everything is a-okay.