Rumer's Story, part 1

Some early niggles

January to March 2015
Conception to 12 weeks pregnant

After a fairly long time of on-and-off trying to conceive and a very early miscarriage in September 2014, you can imagine how pleased we were on the 29th January 2015 to see this...

I knew I was about 5 weeks, having had an ovulation scan in the cycle we'd conceived. I'd put off testing for a week after my period after my miscarriage experience. We were excited and anxious. I waited a week to go and book in with my GP. I chose my local midwife team who I used to work for and our catchment but not all that local hospital and waited for the referral to come through.

At what I thought was 7+2 weeks pregnant I had some brown spotting and, already anxious after my miscarriage last time, we went into the Early Pregnancy Unit at our catchment hospital. It was a Saturday and they weren't scanning but they asked us to come back in the next day for a scan which we did. The scan showed a sac and an embryo with a heartbeat measuring at exactly 6 weeks. I thought I was 7+3. A lot of googling after this appointment showed it is common for size to be out at this stage and that many babies catch up in size. I was half reassured. In hindsight though it was possibly the first sign of Rumer's problems. Because we were anxious and the fact I had a large corpus luteal cyst we were invited back for another scan when I was about 8 weeks pregnant.

I continued to have pinkish bleeding whenever I went to work so I took some time off and the bleeding stopped. We went for our scan and it showed a bigger blobbish looking fetus measuring in at 8 weeks with a good heartbeat and only 4 days out from my dates. I thought I was due on 1st October and they said the 5th.

We felt more reassured and waited for the midwives and nuchal scan. We declined another scan as we had always wanted to minimise scans in this pregnancy. Two days before the nuchal scan, I had some pain which may have been due to corpus luteal cyst rupturing and I was admitted to the hospital overnight, but as there were no concerns, I went home the next day. On the 18th March we had our nuchal scan. According to the dates from the 8-week scan, Rumer should have just been big enough for it, but she measured one day too small, putting the official due date back yet another day to the 6th October.

We were asked to come back a week later on 26th March to redo the nuchal scan, which of course we did, and it was fine. They checked her thoroughly, noted no concerns and booked the anomaly scan for us. The risks for all three major trisomies was low. Her nuchal fold was 1.5mm, however the PAPP-A was 0.328 MoM and Beta HCG 0.538 MoM, which put Rumer's risk for Trisomy 18 up to 1 in 415 but nobody was worried about that.

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