New Baby, New Blog

At the suggestion of my friend Cee, who I know in Real Life as well as in Blog Land, I am blogging here about my pregnancy since it is too early to tell anyone officially yet. Since I have already been writing blog posts about it but not posting them, with the idea that when I do announce it on the blog, I'd then put the posts in and backdate them, I actually have a lot of material. I'll start posting those later this week.

Today I am officially 9 weeks pregnant. My stomach is already poking out, and Baby is allegedly only the size of a grape. At 9 weeks though, the uterus is about the size of a cantaloupe. Why are all reproductive issues always categorized like fruit? I had the same issues with the fibroids - "This one is about the size of a tangerine," they would say.

Anyway, yesterday, I had taken the day off work for Viva's birthday and was running around doing birthday-related errands for her party later in the day. While I was in the supermarket picking up last minute things, my cell rang. It was my OB-GYN.

"I don't want you to worry, but some of your bloodwork came back abnormal," she said. "From the bloodwork, it looks as though you are a cystic fibrosis carrier. Do you know what cystic fibrosis is?"

"Yes, I know what it is," I said.* But perhaps she is used to people saying this and then coming back and asking stupid questions, because then she said:

"Cystic fibrosis is a respiratory disease that can be pretty serious and sometimes fatal. What I'd like to do is to have your husband tested, because if he is also a carrier, you have a one-in-four chance that the baby might have cystic fibrosis. What we would do then is do additional testing on the baby in utero and then you could decide what to do."

"That is really strange, because this didn't come up with my last pregnancy," I said. "And my daughter doesn't have it."

"Well, not everyone tests for this," she said. "But we've seen it so we test for it."

Incidentally, this is 15 minutes before I was supposed to be at Viva's school, setting up balloons and cupcakes. So I told the doctor I would talk to my husband about getting tested and I'm seeing her Friday anyway so I'd tell her then what we decide.

This morning I called my former OB-GYN, who I love love love but who no longer takes my insurance. (Oh, the agony.) Her nurse told me that I was not tested for cystic fibrosis because it wasn't a standard test back then. ("Back then" being 5 years ago.) So Sweet Dub is coming with me on Friday to the doctor's appointment and will get his blood drawn. Here's some info from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation:

Genetic Carrier Testing — More than 10 million Americans are symptomless
carriers of the defective CF gene. This test can help detect carriers, who could
pass CF onto their children. To have cystic fibrosis, a child must inherit one
copy of the defective CF gene from each parent.

Each time two carriers of the CF gene have a child, the chances are:
25% the child will have CF;
50% the child will carry the CF gene but not have CF; and
25% the child will not carry the gene and not have CF.

I don't know what else to say on this, so, moving on:

In other world news, today, Sweet Dub and I are going back to the house that we lost last month. We have opened negotiations with the owners, have talked them down on the price, and we'll be doing a walk-through this evening. More to come...

* It turns out later when we are talking about this at home that the only reason we have an inkling of what cystic fibrosis is, is because Sweet Dub and I have seen the same movie starring Craig T. Nelson about Frank Deford's daughter, Alex. "You know the one, where he's pounding the shit out of her chest?" Sweet Dub says. Okay, it was funny to us, maybe because humor is how we deal with stress.