Ultrasound 3

Baby G's third ultrasound was Friday. This is at 24 weeks.

This is supposed to be a picture of her foot. What exactly is her foot in this picture, I don't know.

The US tech printed this picture though because I asked her where the baby's feet are. Apparently, her feet are somewhere above my belly button. Baby G is already in birthing position, which means her head is lower, and most the time that I think I've felt the baby "kick" me has actually been her head-butting me.

This is another profile shot of Baby G. You can see the shape of her head on the right. The dark space in the center of her torso is her stomach, and the lines you can see going up and down are apparently her diaphragm and liver. The tech said this was a beautiful shot of her diaphragm and liver, which is why she gets paid to do this, because I don't see what she was seeing at all. On the left you can see her leg bones and her knee. (She's got her legs pulled up towards her torso here.) The thick thing at the top going from her mouth to her knee is actually the umbilical cord.

This is a 3D picture of Baby G's face. She's a little young for the picture to come out very well, but they showed me and printed it out anyway. It's pretty cool that you can see her eyes and nose and mouth, and her little arms and hands are pulled up towards her face. During the scan, they actually showed me some 4D images, which means I could see her moving over time in 3D, and she was moving her hand around.

The 3D pix are puts together with 1mm thick slices of 2D images, just like with MRIs. So if her head cuts off in certain areas or anything like that, it's because that part wasn't in the scan range of the 2D image.

I'm hoping these images come through ok, but if you want me to email them to you, send me an email to let me know.

Now for the medically prevalent and slightly scary info. If you're friends/fam and this is the first you've heard of all this, I apologize. I'm not trying to keep anyone out of the loop...just not doing such a good job of keeping everybody updated, which is sorta the point to this blog. If you want to just hear the good stuff and not the scary stuff, STOP READING NOW...


Baby G is still smaller than we'd like for her to be. Right now, we don't have any reason to believe that this is problematic, but the doctor still wants to monitor her pretty closely. As of Friday, she was in the 13th percentile for size. They don't start to get really concerned until the 10th percentile. (For the curious, they calculated her weight to be 1lb 2oz on Friday.)

Reasons to not be concerned:
1) The doctor said she looks anatomically perfect.
2) We've had an amnio which rules out a lot of scary possibilities.
3) There is plenty of amniotic fluid around her, and the doppler was normal, meaning that enough blood is going through the umbilical cord. These 2 things together indicate that the placenta is doing it's job and the problem shouldn't be undernourishment.
4) As of my appointment with the midwife the week before, my uterus is the size it should be. (There's nothing really exciting to report from this appointment; so if you're wondering why you hadn't heard about it, that's why.)

Reasons to maybe be concerned, but probably everything's ok:
1) The first US 8 weeks before showed her to be 10 days behind in growth. The second US 3 weeks before showed her to be 13 days behind in growth. This last one showed her to be 17 days behind in growth. So she's grown 6 weeks worth in 7 weeks time. Babies grow at different rates after the first trimester; so this might be nothing to worry about. The doctor said this is why we're continuing to be monitored as closely as we are.
2) The doctor wants to see us again at the smallest increment to really show a difference in ultrasounds, which is 3 weeks. It always makes me a little nervous when they want to see us as quickly as possible. She's a high risk pregnancy specialist; so she's probably more apt to monitor us more closely than a normal doctor would. We don't mind though, because she is great and if there is a problem, we feel like she'd be the one to catch it.

OK. I think that's it for now.

[Update: I mistakenly thought the first 2 ultrasounds were 4 weeks apart, but they were really 3 weeks apart. I fixed the post accordingly.]