Knowing too much can be a bad thing

So of course, digesting my u/s information has me on a new worry tangent. I have to stop being so neurotic, its going to be the death of me or cause gallstones or something. Anyways, I haven’t shared this thinking with Jack (why invite him into the worry pot for unnecessary torture, its torture enough for myself that I think these things) but here goes:

When I got my u/s, the tech didn’t show any live images. I’m not sure if this is standard practice in Winnipeg, but alas all we got to see was one still image cross section. There were no identifiable measurements etc. on the screen, and it looked like a cross section as though the image was taken from pointing the probe at the babies bellybutton. We could see skull outline and abdominal outline but no limbs. Hence Jack said it looked like a jellybean. I would have been much more reassured somehow if we could have seen a side profile, you know, the traditional lips, nose, spine, legs kind of view. Whatever, maybe that wasn’t possible due to baby’s position.

However.

Now I’m worried that the tech didn’t show us that view because the baby’s nuchal translucency measurement was visually way off. She knew I worked in health care, maybe she didn’t show the side profile because she knew I’d see an increased NT by visually examining proportion alone (I’m not that arrogant; I don’t think I can read u/s images THAT well). I’m thinking this way because the doctor’s office called and ‘wanted to review the results of the scan’. Is this normal practice? I mean, if the purpose of the scan was to find a heartbeat, and I know that’s there because the tech told me so (we don’t get to ‘hear’ it or see it with this scan) then what is there to review? Which got me catastrophizing about the babies NT measurement. Which is silly because of a)my aforementioned acceptance of peace in knowing I have no control over it anyways and b)I just want a healthy baby, which would include most anomolies that increase NT measurements anyways.

I guess when you work ‘on the inside’ you just see too much, too many paths that families bravely (and painfully) walk down when their children are ‘atypically’ developing.

I worry that the sluggish hcg and non-NT showing tech are because babe has primordial dwarfism, or trisomy 21 (or gah, 18 or 13) or spina bifida. Not because I wouldn’t love MY baby no matter how they came out (interesting how my position on pro-choice changes when it comes to MY critter, isn’t it?) but because I feel from the years in  PICU and NICU have shocked me a bit more than most lay people to know what it really means in terms of sacrifice and pain for these children if they have complications from their conditions (GAH now I’m thinking about how I want to see the heart chambers and count them all, and make sure there are no outflow tract obstructions… great.)

Perhaps the biggest problem is really me: I have just enough knowledge in this area to be scared, but not enough to be reassured that chances are this isn’t what my future will reveal. I can just as easily work myself up in this manner, or work myself down.

I wish I had control over whether these thoughts popped into my head in the first place- I’d rather not be thinking them at all. I want to be thinking and celebrating the glorious creation of our jellybean with its 169 heart rate. Remembering Jack’s hug, studying the grainy cell phone picture he snapped (photos are $50 each from u/s here which we elected out of as you can’t really tell what it is from the view the tech provided) in pride before I began to study it clinically, is a much healthier place to be.

GAH. I wonder would I be like this if the first pregnancy had gone to term? Is this nervous post miscarriage brain, nurse who’s seen too much brain, or some wacky combination of both that just can’t be helped at this point?

I refuse to let the neurosis be too all consuming though. In time, I’ll know one way or another, so perhaps this is all just an excellent exercise in patience. Or at least, that is what I can take from it for now.

FGirl