It's been a while since since I posted about Baby Mhire #2, but I can guarantee she was still in Mommy's tummy, growing away and bringing me all kinds of sleepless nights and queasy stomach moments. At this point, Jack knew that his baby sister was in Mommy's tummy, although he still didn't grasp exactly what that meant. The week after Thanksgiving, we headed to Dr. Harn's office for the ~20 week anatomy scan. This is usually the appointment when gender prediction becomes a bit more reliable, so I held my breath to see if we still had a baby girl.
We got all kids of shots of fingers and toes, arms and legs, loaded on a CD for us to take with us and bring back to future appointments (which we always forgot!). All of the measurements looked right on track and yes, still a girl!
We sat down with Dr. Harn after the ultrasound and he reiterated that everything looked really good. There was, however, one thing that he needed to tell us. He hated to tell us, because he had never seen it turn out to be anything bad, but he had to let us know. My heart sunk into my stomach. What could he have to tell us about our precious baby girl that we had just seen squirming around and fallen in love with just a little more? He continued to tell us that she had an ecogenic intracardiac focus, or a calcium deposit on her heart that shows up as a bright spot in the ultrasound. They are fairly common, occurring in 3-5% of all pregnancies and usually disappearing by 32 weeks. In the absence of other markers, it usually doesn't mean anything, but there is some evidence that babies with an ecogenic focus have a higher risk of Downs Syndrome.
I know, it could have been a lot worse, but I didn't want to hear that my baby was anything other than perfect, so I burst into tears. Dr. Harn did his best to calm me down - he even got me an appointment with the maternal fetal medicine specialist that day for the higher level ultrasound as I was headed out of town for work the next morning. Dr. Koster confirmed everything Dr. Harn had said. Other than this bright spot, everything looked perfect, and this finding didn't increase the odds of Downs Sydrome from the earlier genetic tests, so she didn't recommend that we do anything else. Of course, I scoured the internet for everything I could find and was actually put a little more at ease by what I read. It would continue to be in the back of my mind throughout the rest of the pregnancy, but was most likely nothing that should keep me up at night.
Here are a couple of pictures of our baby girl at 18 weeks and 2 days:
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