Low Risk

Two photos for today - Natalie sleeping. She is a little angel. I'm glad that she has afternoon kindergarten and can sleep in and get all the beauty rest that she needs.

After I took her to the bus, I found these two drawing on the counter that she had done on paper towels. Pretty cute.

...Although I wish that permanent markers didn't always find their way into children's hands around here. Try as I might to keep them safely hidden, it's always just a matter of time until the kids have them and they are drawing on walls or on the carpet.

So yesterday I tried to call my doctor's office. It has been two weeks since the Panorama test thing, and they said that the results should be back in 7 days. It has now been almost 2 weeks, so, I called during daytime office hours, but it went straight to their answering service. The lady there told me that they are closed on Wednesdays. Darn. Ok, I guess I'll call tomorrow. But it was a nice surprise when I got a call from his nurse a few hours later! And yes, she was calling to tell me the results. If you will recall, after the ultrasound on Aug 29th, there were some "subtle yet abnormal" findings that indicated possible genetic deformities -
   - too much amniotic fluid
   - fists clenched for more than an hour
   - some measurement on the brain was measuring 2 weeks behind development
and one I forgot to mention in the last post -
   - an occasional skipped heart beat

So those are markers for fetal aneuploidy - Aneuploidy is the presence of an abnormal number of chromosomes in a cell (I'm just learning all sorts of new medical jargon) aka "trisomy", which again I tried to explain to myself in the previous post about the Panorama test. I also learned of two conditions that I knew I had but didn't know there were official medical terms for them: AMA (Advanced Maternal Age) and "grandmultiparity" (I've given birth more than 5 times). I'm suffer from AMA and I'm a "grand multipara"! Funny.

Well, good news today, the Panorama test came back and all the results are "low risk". My test results:

• Trisomy 21 - Risk before test: 1/46. Risk after test <1 p="">   
• Trisomy 18 - Risk before test: 1/175. Risk after test 
• Trisomy 13 - Risk before test: 1/524. Risk after test
• Monosomy X - Risk before test: 1/568. Risk after test 

Yay, they are all low risk. The nurse said "That doesn't guarantee there will not be any genetic deformities" but it's still good news. So it looks like there's a good chance that little Benjamin might just be a normal kid like the rest of the bunch, so I guess that's good ;) (Joseph thinks we should name the baby Benjamin, cause it's like he is Joseph of Egypt who is gone and never knew his little brother "Benjamin" ha, so we'll see. Although all the boy names in our family are just 2 syllabus, so it would be breaking the rules for our family names, but we'll see what the little guy has to say about it after he gets here.