Ultrasound Pictures

Psalm 139:13-18 

13       For you created my inmost being; 
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful, 
    I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
¹⁷ How precious to me are your thoughts,^[a] God! 
    How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸ Were I to count them, 
    they would outnumber the grains of sand —
    when I awake, I am still with you.

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These verses were especially important to me during the week when I did not know if my baby had Trisomy 18 or not and when I was trusting her life and her future to the one who knew about her before I even existed.  I thought it important to attach them to this post.

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These first four pictures are from my first ultrasound on May 9th.  Noah got ahold of them and wrinkled them a little so the lines across the images are from him.  ;)  He loves his sister already, can you tell?  *wink*  LOL 

 The bottom of her foot and her bottom?  I don't know for sure what the lump on the right is.

Her heart rate.  153 beats per minute

It's a girl!  (But you already knew that because I took forever with these.  I had to edit all of my personal information off of them and the scanner was being mean to me.)

My doctor printed one of these for each of the kids.  That's the first time any doctor has ever given them their own picture.  They were so excited!  :)  They carried their pictures around forever and I'm still finding them playing with them.

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These next 4 pictures were from the ultrasound to try to determine if our baby girl had Trisomy 18 or not.

This ultrasound took about an hour and they looked at everything!  It was amazing!  We got to see her little heart beating and the four chambers and her brain and stuff I didn't know about or even know what it was supposed to look like.  She waved her little fingers at the ultrasound camera.  She kicked her little feet and rolled over and over and over my ultra-full bladder.  (They wanted my bladder nice and full for this ultrasound and believe me it was.  The tech even said, "Wow!  You're full!  If you ever think you can't hold it let me know!" I was think, "Um, now...I can't hold it now!") 

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(This was the first thing I saw when she put the wand on my tummy.  I knew that a marker for Trisomy includes a small chin so I thought she might have it here...)

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(But this was the very next picture and it looked perfectly normal to my untrained eyes so I began to relax.)

After a lot of measuring, the tech sent me to the bathroom.  She said my bladder was so full it was cramping the baby and making it hard for the baby to wiggle her arms and legs so she could see the hands and feet.  She also needed to take a measurement of my cervix post void.

 When I came back from the bathroom this is how the baby was.  She stretched out to fill up the space... "Ahhhh!  Mommy, that's soooo much better!" (You can't see her arms in this picture but her little arms were sticking straight up too.)

If you were wondering, yep, she's still a girl.

The ultrasound tech wasn't allowed to talk to us about the ultrasound but she could point out what we were looking at and she did tell us it was good that the baby was wiggling her hands at the camera.  (I knew a marker for Trisomy 18 included clenched fists with the fingers overlapping.)

When the doctor came in to talk to us, I was fairly certain she did not have Trisomy 18 from the lack of markers on the things I could understand.  The doctor told us it was normal for a baby to be uncooperative and to have a marker or two show up that they just weren't certain or something like cleft lip that can go with Trisomy 18 or something else.  They said it was normal to get an ultrasound with one or two markers and still have a Trisomy 18-free baby.  But she said, this was the most perfect ultrasound they could have hoped for and that they saw everything they needed to see and that everything looked perfect.  There was no doubt in any of their minds about the results of the images and everything had come out wonderfully. There was not even one marker for Trisomy 18.  Not one! 

They offered us a blood test (this is a new thing they do...an alternate to the amniocentesis and it just comes from your arm...so no risk to the baby.)  and an amniocentesis.  We turned them both down based on the results of the ultrasound.