May 21, 2007 - 3D Ultrasound Pics

I went to the maternal-fetal medicine specialist today for another ultrasound and I think Angeliyah is doing pretty good. Her growth is up in the 4th percentile now instead of the 2nd percentile. She has a little extra fluid in her brain, but not enough to be too concerned about. At this appt, the Dr. said she didn't have any extra fingers or toes (which I suspected...when he counted 6 fingers last time, I couldn't figure out where he was seeing the 6th finger, I only counted 5). She has her hands clenched together, which is common for Trisomy 13 babies, so it's not very easy to see her actual fingers. You have to count the joints instead. We probably won't know for sure until she's born unless we get a good 3-D view of her hands at one of my future appts. Another good thing was the Dr. couldn't see any facial abnormalities. He took a few 3-D pictures of her face and although they weren't very clear (due to low amniotic fluid and the fact that she has her face smashed up against the placenta), he's fairly certain that she doesn't have a cleft lip. However the pictures were pretty blurry around her mouth so he couldn't say for sure. I'm attaching one of the 3-D pictures. The attachment is even less clear than the original because I scanned it and we don't have a very good scanner. Most of you might not really know what you're looking at if you haven't seen u/s pictures very often, but hopefully you can make out the top half of her face. He'll look at her face in 3-D again next month. Even though the pictures didn't come out very clear, I was really excited to have some pictures of her face. You can (well, at least I can) clearly see the shape of her forehead, eyes, eyebrows and nose. Also, she's been in breech position for about a month now. Raife did the same thing. He was bottom down from 5 months on and never turned around. I'm thinking that Angeliyah will be the same way. Because I have a wall down the middle of my uterus (the top half of it) and the left side of my uterus is half the size of the right, my babies don't have a lot of options for positions. Anyway, I'm guessing she won't turn around before birth. I was planning on having a repeat c-section anyway, so it's fine with me if she doesn't.Somehow, even though Angeliyah still has all these problems, Matt and I were really encouraged today. As long as she continues to grow, she should be born alive at least close to full-term if not at full-term, and more than anything we just want to meet our daughter. We are still praying for God to heal her. A couple weeks ago we were feeling a little discouraged and I especially didn't really feel like I had the faith to be praying for a miracle. I was wondering if it was God's will to heal her and if I should even be praying for healing. Since then, it seems like everywhere we turn we keep getting the same message...from our pastor, to the several books we're currently reading, to the new CD I got for Mother's Day, we keep hearing/reading "It's not our job to try to understand the ways or the will of God, it's our job to trust Him". And so even though we really don't understand yet what God is doing in this situation and we don't know if He's going to heal Angeliyah or not, we're going to focus on keeping our trust in God and continue praying for healing for our daughter. No matter what happens, we know we'll be with her for an eternity in heaven someday, but we sure would love to get to know her a little bit before then. Thank you all again for praying for us and for Angeliyah. Matt and I can't tell you all how much we appreciate all the support and prayer we've received. Please continue to pray with us for healing.