Follow Up Appointment

After getting the shocking results that our baby did not have down syndrome the doctors wanted to do a follow up appointment to check make sure physically that he was healthy. I forgot to mention in the earlier post that while they were doing the ultrasound they told us we were having a boy. At that point I didn't care what we were having as long as the baby was healthy. By this time Adam was so excited to be having a boy. He started talking about everything they would do together. They would play sport, go fishing and do everything a father and son do. I could picture the two of them together and I was so excited to be having a boy.
           Adam and I went to our follow up ultrasound a couple weeks later. At this ultrasound I wasn't nervous, I knew our baby boy was healthy and everything would be okay. After the tech was finished taking pictures the doctor came in to do a follow up. I started to notice that the doctor was looking alot at our babies brain heart and lungs. This was the longest ultrasound ever, and the doctor wasn't saying anything. At one point we asked the doctor what was going on and he said he would tell us in a minute. I felt something was wrong. After about 30 minutes of looking at our baby the doctor finished. I asked him if everything was okay, and all he told me was we should talk in the other room. My legs went numb, my heart was pounding, I felt dizzy. What possibly could be wrong with our baby boy. He took us in the other room and told us our baby had developed hydrops, which is fluid around the heart, lungs and brain. It means his organs were shutting down. I asked the doctor what this meant, and he told me something I never expected to hear. He told us that our baby probably wouldn't make it to full-term. Tears began to fill up in my eyes and I felt as if I was in a dream. How could this be happening, this kind of thing only happens to other people, not me. The doctor said a lot of other things but mentioned he wanted to test me for CMV, and told us that it could be the cause of our baby developing hydrops. CMV is a virus that most adults usually have had, but I had never had it so didn't have the antibodies to help my baby fight it off. It was something I had never heard before. How could I have protected my baby from something I didn't even know existed. They tested me and siad I would hear back in a couple days.
            I remember the drive home felt like a dream. I was in shock and my heart was broken. All my hopes and dreams for our baby boy were crushed. I few days later a received the results that our baby boy had CMV. They scheduled me for a follow up apointment to see how fast the hydrops was developing.