The First Scan

We found out I was pregnant in the summer of 2018. All seemed well at the 12 week scan, no concerns, and I had the blood test to screen for Down’s, Patau’s and Edward’s syndromes. All very routine. A few days later I received a voicemail from the midwives that they needed to discuss my results. We had to wait an entire weekend to be able to call them back, telling myself that everything would be fine, when inside my anxiety was creeping in. When I finally spoke to the midwife she explained that my blood test had come high risk for all 3 syndromes and my heart sank. 

To put it in context only 5% of women get a high risk result. Low risk is deemed any woman with a result above a 1 in 150 chance of either syndrome. ‘Normally’ the chances of Down’s syndrome is roughly 1 in 350 for a woman of my age, Patau’s and Edward’s syndromes 1 in 5000 chance. My results showed a 1 in 5 chance of Down’s and a 1 in 32 chance of Patau’s and Edward’s syndromes. Now to clarify at this point that if my baby had Down’s syndrome I would have embraced that gladly, that is not something that would have concerned me. With the other syndromes a baby is lucky to survive the pregnancy.

When you get these results you have several choices - you could do nothing, you could pay for the NIPT blood test or have an amniocentesis. An amnio is an injection into your stomach to test the chromosomes in the amniotic fluid, however it could cause a miscarriage. We didn’t feel it was worth the risk, I knew that it would be possible to see if the baby had the other syndromes at the 20 week scan and having a termination would be no easier at 14ish weeks than it would be at 20 weeks - I would have to give birth. I never expected to have to consider these decisions when I became pregnant, of course you don’t, you think it’ll go smoothly. 

The reason my results had come back high risk was due to me having an extremely low Papp A reading, which is the placental hormone. Now, when I look back, it explains a lot. 

We did decide to have the blood test, it’s not as accurate as the amnio, but we may get some reassurance. It came back low risk - I can’t even begin to describe the relief...