Not reassured

I had a bad run of contractions Saturday morning, two hours' worth of them, every three minutes or so. I thought about going in, but at just shy of 20 weeks, they wouldn't do anything anyway. Doesn't make me feel very good about how likely I am to avoid preterm labor and premature birth, though.

Also not reassuring were my quad screen results, which came back at 1:100 for Trisomy 18. (That is, 1 of 100 women with those levels will have a baby with T18.) My OB said she still would "absolutely not" recommend an amnio, given that we didn't observe any of the other T18 anomalies. However, 1 of 275 women with nothing other than CPCs will have a T18 baby, so the quad screen has actually raised our risk profile.

Dr. Pro wants to wait and do a Level II ultrasound at 26 weeks, to look in more detail for the other T18 anomalies (echogenic bowel, clubbed feet, ventricular septal defects, and so forth), which are easier to spot after the baby gets bigger anyway. However, six more weeks is a long time to wait, when there's a 1 in 100 chance that your baby will die. 1% is actually a pretty significant chance, higher than the risk of uterine rupture in a VBAC, higher than the risk of death in a breech birth, higher than the risk of miscarriage from an amnio.

I have struggled since the beginning with the nebulous intuition that things are not going to turn out well for this pregnancy. For the most part, I've just dismissed it as paranoia, but it keeps getting harder to ignore. Now, I can't even imagine making actual preparations for the baby. The thought of picking out a crib and furnishing the nursery, knowing that there's a 1% chance we'd have to take it back down, makes me ill.