Have You Heard the Good News? Part Deux

8-20-09

My cell phone beep boop boops its disco ring from across my office. It’s gotta be them. Test results. Gulp.

“Good news! Your screen was negative, which is a convoluted way of saying that your chances for the genetic conditions we were testing for have gone way down,” says Genetic Counselor #3, whose name I’ve read on the website but is until this moment just a name on a website.

“That’s great!” I say, heartbeat in throat.

“Would you like me to go over the specific numbers with you?”

Oh hell yes.

They break down like this: Purvis’ chance of Down’s Syndrome is down from 1 in 130 to 1 in 1,300; Trisomy 18 is as low as it can go (1/10,000) and Spina Bifida is 1 in 6,000, six times lower than expected for my age. (Which will be 37 by the time Purvis meets us and is considered elderly in child-bearing world.)

“There is no recommended follow-up,” GC#3 says. “Congratulations!”

“I’m so glad you called. My husband and I have been talking a lot about amnio.”

“Of course you are always welcome to have amnio. It’s the only way to know for sure. But it’s not recommended with these results.”

I call Mr. Crud to share the good news. He takes a seat as I throw fractions at him with more gusto than any fraction I’ve ever talked about. Then he does what he does best—-tease apart the real meaning of what GC#3 said.

“By recommended does she mean not recommended in the neutral sense or that they don’t recommend that we have amnio?” He asks.

“Uh, I don’t know.” I scan my notes beside the numbers: bloodwork good, no follow-up.

“She probably means it in the neutral medical sense.” He says, slightly disappointed.

I am too. This whole process is nerve-wracking. Part of me wishes that we had gotten one of those infamous false positives so that amnio or whatever further testing there is to be done would be recommended and we wouldn’t have to decide for ourselves. Yes, I would really like to know 99.9% for sure that Purvis is—as I pray every morning despite it’s clunky language “developing normally”—but risking a miscarriage to get that information doesn’t feel right. At least at this moment of relief and yahoo-ness, it doesn’t. I might be waking up in the middle of the night after imagining Purvis’ tiny body twisted by some horrid genetic disorder and change my mind completely. But I don’t know. The more I think about the whole child-bearing enterprise, the more I come to terms with the fact—a fact of life that Mrs. Garrett should have included among lesser facts like don’t judge a book (or a fat girl) by its cover and Jo might not be a lesbian, just a tomboy—that life is uncertainty. Everything changes. Control is an illusion.

“I guess we should make a decision by the end of the weekend,” Mr. Crud says.

“That sounds fair.”

But I feel like I’m already leaving amnio behind, watching it get smaller in the rearview mirror as I look ahead to the next ultrasound in a few weeks, the anatomy scan that Doctor Awesome-in-Waiting (who will from here on out be known as Dr. Adorable because she looks like she’s 22, is petite of size, and very cute in addition to being a smart, reassuring doc) assures us will be fun. “You’ll get a cool 3-D picture to take home.”

We had our first meeting with Dr. Adorable last Friday. I spilled out my anxieties, which she carefully and gently countered with reality checks. (“Your chance of miscarriage have gone way down now that you’re in the second trimeter.”) We listened to Purvis’ galloping heartbeat and I felt a weeks worth of exhales pour forth. Unfortunately I did not feel such relief when seeing the number on the scale. Egads. Dr. Adorable said I was at the high end of normal, but I caught the drift that I might want to slow down the desert-fest. I knew I should have taken off my jacket before they weighed me! As long as the scale remains the most harrowing part of this pregnancy, I’m good. I’ve battled those numbers—and the impact on my self-esteem—before. I always thought that I’d be cool with getting fat when I got pregnant. Old habits die hard. Or as the yogis say, samskaras are a bitch. (The yogis don’t actually say that, but they might want to consider adding another sutra.)