Positive Quad Screen?

Part of the second trimester of pregnancy involves getting a quad screen. This is just a screening where I give blood, it's tested for 4 different things, and that gives you some information about the likelihood of Down Syndrom, Edward Syndrom or things like Spina Bifida or other neural tube defects.

So I got the quad screen done and a couple days later, the doctors office called and said, "It's not an emergency, but the doctor would like to talk to you early next week if you're available." I said ok, hung up the phone and called Paul freaking out a little. He told me to call the doctors office to see if the Dr. would just call me back and tell me whats up, they wouldn't. So I made an appointment to talk to him.

While I was waiting the longest 7 days of my life, I did some research. This was not a TEST, it didn't mean my child HAD Downs, it just would mean that there was some levels of protein that were a little off. Since we thought that the doctors dates were off anyway, we figured the levels they found in the screening would also be wrong and that it would be a false positive. I armed Paul with this information and Wednesday finally came. We went to the OB and were not surprised that the screen gave us 1:128 odds of being positive for DS. That's it... a mere 0.8% chance. We were ok with the news because we did our research and we believe there are other factors that gave us a high result.

The next day,  I went to pick my mom up at work and we got to play with the ultrasound machine. She, of course, looked to see the gender right away. "HE'S GOT A SCROTUM, HE'S GOT A SCROTUM!" She started to chant. He for sure is a boy, or a girl with a scrotum! We checked him out and he looked fine.

This past Saturday, we had an appointment at the OB with a sonographer and she said that the baby looked great and amazing. At the end of the appointment, we told her about the quad screen and she said everything looked good, but the only thing that she saw was a Intracardiac Echogenic Foci. She said that this happens to a lot of children, it also happens with DS children, so it's not really a tell tale sign somethings wrong. After doing research on that as well, it appears to disappear in the third trimester. Again, not worried. We have a more detailed doctors appointment with specialists next week. We'll see how that goes!