It's now 23 weeks.
A couple weeks ago we had an ultrasound in our local hospital, live-streamed to the medical team at BC Womens' Hospital in Vancouver. The ascites is unchanged. It's both good and bad news. It's not going away, but it's not getting any worse, either. I took that as good news; I need all of it I can get right now.
We just finished a set of appointments in Vancouver. However, this time we had a little bit of time to prepare for the trip; enough lead time that my wife was able to get in touch with a social worker in Vancouver who arranged for us to stay at the Ronald McDonald House on campus. Not only that, we qualified for financial support from the Variety Club. It honestly never occurred to me that this kind of help was available; I figured I'd have to make do on my own, and I was struggling to figure out how I was going to make ends meet while spending all this money to drive to and stay in Vancouver. I can't thank these guys enough for the help they've provided me. I've got enough to worry about without trying to figure out how I'm supposed to pay for all of it.
The first appointment was another two-hour ultrasound, scheduled for first thing Monday morning. The hospital bent their usual schedule a little for us so that we could reduce the number of days we spent out of town, and I could reduce the amount of work I would miss. The ultrasound was difficult, but it came from a completely unexpected source.
Puffy capacitors.
The baby was more or less fine; his condition is unchanged from the last scan two weeks prior. Our ultrasound tech was great. However, luck of the draw gave us the oldest ultrasound machine they had, and it had decided that it would slow down and freeze after ten or fifteen minutes of operation. That means our scans were regularly interrupted by a fatal error, and a five-minute reboot of the machine. It's about ten or twelve years old, which puts it in the time frame to be a victim of the capacitor plague. Not that I can say for certain, since I didn't open the machine up to take a look, but the manufacture time and the symptoms come together in a nice burst of serendipity.
After our ultrasound, we met with our social worker, who made sure we had a place to stay for our next appointment in four weeks' time. I gotta hand it to her. For us, the actual hospital appointment is but a small part of the entire experience; since we're out of town, there's so much more to worry about. Things like where we're going to sleep. She takes care of those things for us so that we don't have to worry about them, and instead we could worry about other things, like what we were going to eat at the cafeteria.
I find it amusing that the cafeteria has all sorts of healthy choices for beverages, but they carry Diet Coke instead of regular Coke.
Anyway, so with lunch out of the way, we met with a neonatologist. He presented us with the latest theory, that our baby has leaky lymph vessels. Normally, the lymph vessels collect lymph and return it to the circulatory system, but as it was explained to us, the lymph vessels in our baby are not properly formed, allowing lymph to leak out and collect in the abdominal cavity. Since the lymphatic system operates at a low pressure, the buildup eventually stabilizes when the pressure reaches equilibrium, which is why the baby's belly swelled up to a point and then stopped.
This condition is not uncommon, and normally corrects itself within weeks or months after birth. However, the fluid buildup must be drained shortly before birth, so that the baby is able to properly take his first breath. This is normally done with a needle through mom's abdomen, and since this procedure can't be done during active labour (because the abdominal wall is contracting and this would disrupt any procedure involving a needle through the abdominal wall,) we're looking at a caesarian section shortly before our due date. After birth, we're told the baby will have a drain installed, and then spend some time in the NICU while the lymph vessels close up. At that point, the drain is removed and we can go home.
Prior to that, though, the doctors are going to start doing nonstress tests to keep an eye on the baby and determine if any early intervention is needed. The first of these tests will happen on our next trip to Vancouver in early June; any earlier would be pointless as an intervention would carry little chance of a positive outcome anyway.
We returned home with a generally good feeling, and our next step all planned out. And since my next trip is nearly upon me, I should close this entry so that I can start the next one.
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