The decisions begin

Like I've said before, the Internet can be a blessing and it can be a curse. Dave and I did more than our fair share of searching the Internet for information on Tri-18. There are so many negatives out there, but there are also those rays of hope where children do survive. (We hear there's a 30 year old with Tri-18, but that is rare.)
At this point of our discovery, we were wondering what was best for this baby. There were times when I'd pray to God and just ask Him to let me miscarry. Please don't make me put this baby through pain and through dying. I questioned my strength. The hardest death I've had to deal with was my nana's. How would I face the young death of my own child, the one I was to carry for nine months? Would my pregnancy be a waste?
I tell you, we've gone through a lot of soul searching. But I digress. At this point, the point between the blood test and the Level 2 ultrasound, we were walking a tightrope, two weeks worth of a tightrope. We had to think of the positives and the negatives. We had to be prepared for what we were to find out for there were decisions we'd have to make. We knew the markers to look for, but what if only one or two minor ones showed up? I was adamant that I did not want an amniocentesis. What if a lot of the prominent markers showed? How were we to handle that? Both of us decided that termination was out of the question, unless it proved to be harmful to me (that was Dave's request).
At the Level 2 appointment, we spoke to a genetic counselor who basically went through our family tree to see if any other problems might show up. Nothing. So why this Trisomy 18? It's not hereditary, for the most part. Apparantly, my age is a factor. That is so hard to deal with when I see others older than I am having healthy babies.
After speaking to the counselor, we had the ultrasound. There we sat, looking at the monitor, watching the baby, watching the sonographer, not having a clue as to what we were looking at, hoping and praying that everything was normal. The doctor came in and took a look, glanced at me a few times with his cold eyes, and then took us into his office. He saw two markers--choroid plexus cysts in the brain (which he said were sometimes found in normal babies) and a missing middle pinkey bone (sorry, I don't know the technical term for that one). Dave and I knew that these were not the strongest markers. What to do? What to do? This still didn't answer our question as to whether our baby had Trisomy 18 or not. The next step was amnio, but remember, I was dead-set against this.
I cried. And cried. I knew I could not go through this pregnancy wondering if my baby had this condition or not. We saw straight fingers, not overlapping ones. There was no rocker foot. No folds in the neck area. The doctor couldn't even find problems with the heart. The kidneys were questionable, but when you see so many positives, and then these two negatives, you have no definitive answer. Making the decision to have the amnio was one of the most grueling decisions I've ever made. I gave in. I had to know; otherwise, the remaining days of my pregnancy would be hell. The amnio might not give us the results we'd hoped for, but at least that big question mark would be out of the way. I can positively tell you that I've never been so scared in my entire life. I sobbed the whole time I was being prepped and didn't stop until the procedure was done.
We were told that the short results would be in in two days, but being that it was Wednesday, we might not hear from anyone until Monday. The full results would take about two weeks. Once again, we were on that tightrope, with a big question mark as our pole.