The Medical Information

Well, I wish I was creating this blog for other reasons, but that is not the case. I decided to start this to keep friends and family up to date on what is going on in our lives. First I will start with the medical information and then we will get to how we are handling all of this.....Many of you know that a couple of weeks ago Tom and I found out we had a miscarriage. We went in for our first ultrasound and I should have been at twelve weeks but the baby only measured 7.5 weeks and there was no heartbeat. I had not had any other previous signs of miscarriage. I went in for a D&C procedure the next day. Last week I got a call from my doctor, which is never fun. She said they had gotten the pathology report back from my D&C and that it was a little abnormal...again, words that are not fun to hear. She said that when doing the D&C there was a fetus, but that there was also some extra tissue that should not have been there. They call this a partial molar pregnancy, which means that there was something genetically wrong with the baby. In all cases of molar pregnancy the pregnancy will end in miscarriage because of the genetic problems, such as too many chromosomes. The odds of this happening are 1 in 1000 in the US. Lucky me. With molar pregnancies that extra tissue has a chance of regrowing which is not good. If it starts to regrow they consider it a cancer and it will have to be treated with anti cancer drugs...what, I'm not exactly sure and I probably won't find out unless it goes that far. The odds of that happening I believe are 1 in 40,000. So those are good odds....But, to make sure that the tissue isn't regrowing I have to go in and get lab work done once a week until my HCG levels (pregnancy hormones) go back down. After that I have to go in once a month for six months for lab work and pelvic exams. I am going back to the doctor next Friday. While going through all of this they do not want me to get pregnant. If I were to get pregnant they would not be able to tell if it was a baby or if it was that tissue regrowing so that would be bad. After all of this is over and we can go ahead and try again, once I get pregnant they will start monitoring me very early on, such as HCG levels and order an early ultrasound. I am glad about the early monitoring because I think it will ease my mind a little bit after having gone through all this....well, this is getting pretty long so I will stop, but there is a ton of information to pass on. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers and I will update you all on what all is going on.