Methobaby

S. had her most recent visit to the doctor’s office.  The visit itself was uneventfully.  Let’s see… will I get shot if i say she’s gained 2 lbs. since her last visit?  Hope not, hehe.  It took a while to see the doc.  You know, I never have been in the “parent” seat in the doctor’s office.  You know the one… that seat other than the one the patient sits in.  Its a weird place to sit.  You’re not the one being seen by the doc.  You’re not the one that can do anything to help the person sitting on the table.  Anyway, after reading through the magazine in my seat 2.5 times, the doctor came in.

Can I say, again, how much i like S.’s doctor.  She happens to be the same doctor who delivered our oldest goddaughter.  

Anyway, it was an amazingly short visit.  She whipped out the portable doppler and listened to the heart beat.  It was strong and at a good rate.  The funny part was, apparently, the fetus was awake and has begun to develop the sense to hear.  It kept turning away from the doppler noise.  As the doctor looked through S.’s records, she noticed that her first trimester screening results had not been placed into her file.  

This is where the fun begins.

Before we left, today, we had to do three things:

1. Make S.’s July appointment.
2. Make the appointment for S.’s 2nd Trimester sonogram
3. Ask the perinatal clinic (where we go for sonogram) what the heck happened with the 1st trimester report.

I’m so beside myself–still–that I’m not too sure I can give this succinctly.  Realize, dear reader, that we’re going on three weeks since the blood sample had been taken.  I know that it takes longer when you farm out tests to 3rd party vendors, but 3 weeks?

So we get to the office and we are asked to wait.  And we waited for about 30 minutes.  When we get called back, finally, the MD talking to us is fluster.  She’s making excuses because she had been given the run-around by the testing agency.  After hemming and hawing the best she could figure out is that the testing agency tainted the tests the first time around.  She said that the 2nd round of tests proved to have insufficient blood sample (in her hemming and hawing, she drops something about low PAPP-A, remember that).   She goes on to talk about how the sonogram results could give us a risk ratio for chromosomal abnormalities, but without the blood tests, there’s a high false-negative rate.

By this time, I’m panicking and S. is confused.  I went into my defense mechanism of giving verbal queues that I am not an idiot and, in fact, understand medical terminology quite well.  Doing so left S. swimming in the avalanche of quick, technical terms.

S. wanted the bottom line, which was we needed to wait until we reach the window for the quad-serum test–which comes around in 2 weeks.  That test will give us a risk ratio.  Problem is, if we find that we have a high risk pregnancy going on, waiting that long limits our options.

I, on the other hand, invite this doc to back track.  I pressure her to talk to me about the retest… the little side comment about low PAPP-A.  She dismissed my question saying it was a bad sample.  but the first time, she said that it was “either a low PAPP-A or insufficient sample”.  The flag for insufficient sample is that the test came out VERY low.  Now low PAPP-A can be a signal for hypertension for S and the baby.  Its can also be an indicator for preeclampsia.  It can signal risk for low birth weight, including the baby simply to stop growing.  And, of course, it can signal risk for Down Syndrome.  I swear, sometimes I hate that I grew up in a family of medical professionals.

So we get sent back to the doc’s office to get a requisition to do the quad screening.  We ask the lab tech to help us out.  She immediately recognizes the name.  She told us about how S.’s results didn’t come back even though everyone who sent in tests the same day as her… and afterwards had reported.  She had called the 3rd party.  They asked for tracking numbers from the shipper as well as stenographer ID.  Each day she called… same result.

So here I am, about to go all Irish on the obstetrics unit of the hospital; imaging what its going to be like with last name on the front of the hospital, when S. pulls me out of my stupor.

She has her form.  We get in the car.  We cry. We’re scared.

The next day, I already had coffee scheduled with one of my parishioners.  She runs one of the labs at another hospital in town.  I tell her my story.  She looks at me and proclaims, “the test got lost and no one wants to own up to it.”

I’m frustrated that no one came out and told me.  But I breathed a sigh of relief.

We’re still a little on pins and needles.  Pray for us as we got through a little anxiety.