This was a very important appointment because at about 18 weeks, Jun was just shy of being halfway through the pregnancy. We went into the doctor's office very excited, because from what we were told, the ultrasound tech should be able to determine gender.
Jun's name was called by the nurse and me, Jun, and my mom (who was nice enough to come down for the appointment) went back to the ultrasound room. The tech got Jun all set up on the table and we saw this on the monitor:
Wow, Puff has gotten a lot bigger from the last time we got an ultrasound. The tech also turned on the 4D ultrasound again and we got a pretty good look at the baby's face:
Puff was (at the time of the appointment) 5.5 inches long and weighed about half a pound.
After all the niceties and "ooo-ing" and "awww-ing" the tech spent about fifteen minutes taking measurements on all of Puff's vital body parts.
Brain? Check.
Heart? Check.
Spine? Check.
Internal Organs? Check.
Arms, Legs and Fingers? Check.
Unidentified mass? Che.... wait what?
The ultrasound tech dropped the words "mass" on us to describe a dark-ish spot near the baby's liver/gall bladder area and it totally killed the joy we were feeling in the room. She tried to get a view of the "mass" from several different angles and she had no idea what it was. She said there was nothing in her medical books to describe what she was seeing (which she said was a good thing).
She referred us to the doctor who took a look at the ultrasound pictures and basically shrugged and said "I don't know" before referring us to a high-risk pregnancy doctor called a Perinatologist. Great. We then spent the whole evening worrying that our baby wasn't the perfectly healthy bundle of joy that we were hoping it would be. Not a lot of sleep was gotten that night.
We were very fortunate to get in to see the specialist the next day. The doctor that we saw was very nice, even though it looked like I was older than she was. She did another ultrasound on Jun and Puff and found the "mass" that the ultrasound tech had found the previous day. Her thoughts about the dark spot?
"I don't know"
Her best guess was that it was gallstones, but while it wasn't unheard of for a fetus to have gallstones, it was pretty rare to see it this early. Her other thought was that it could be a cyst on Puff's liver, which she said wouldn't be a very big deal. She had a fancy tool which could measure bloodflow to different baby body parts and whatever the "mass" was it did not have blood moving in and out of it, this meant that she thought it wasn't a tumor. The doctor was very reassuring, stating that she was almost sure that the "mass" is not a big deal and not something we should lose sleep over as we have an otherwise perfectly healthy baby.
We still don't know what it is, and we have another appointment in a few weeks with the Perinatologist to see if it's still there. We'd certainly appreciate any prayers you would be so inclined to give regarding the matter as it is as yet unresolved.
I almost forgot, we DID find out the gender! We are having a.....
