Prayers for Baby G

As many of you already know, on Tuesday, July 15th the day before we left town to celebrate Rolf's sister Evie's wedding in North Carolina we had our formal ultrasound. This is the ultrasound where they measure and look at every part of the baby in detail to make sure that things are going okay, that the baby is the size that he should be, and to tell the sex. It was very exciting for us but very quickly became very scary. Because of the concerns with my high blood pressure, we were having our ultrasound done by a Maternal Fetal Medicine doctor with a specialty in ultrasound. On this day this turned out to be the first of many signs that God had us right where we needed to be. During the ultrasound the doctor noticed that there was something noticeably wrong with the baby's heart. He called a pediatric cardiologist, who just happened to not be busy to come up and look at the ultrasound. It only took the 2nd doctor a matter of seconds to review the ultrasound and agree. He then asked us to come down to his office where he would be able to do a fetal echo of the baby's heart. We left the first doctor with very little information other than that we were having a boy and they thought everything else looked normal. We moved down to the 2nd doctors clinic and they were waiting for us to get there, another sign that God was with us because in Navy medicine it is very rare that you ever get right in to see the doctor. After about an hour and a half of fetal echo the doctor had some answers for us about what was going on. We found out that our sweet baby boy has a severe and relatively rare heart defect called Truncus Arteriosus I am not evening going to try to explain it but if you are interested check out this link: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=11073.

The Thursday after Evie's wedding we had an amniocentesis done to find out if there were any other possible complications for us to be concerned about (all of which were very, very scary). The amnio in and of it self is very scary because it carries a slight risk for miscarriage of the baby. The doctors assured us that the benefits of knowing something far out weighed the risk and we just prayed that everything would be okay. We spent 11 days waiting, worrying, and praying about what else might be wrong with our little guy and that God would let His will be done and would bring us a peace and understanding no matter what the test results were. On Wednesday, August 6th we found out that all of the results from the amnio were normal and they don't believe there should be any unforeseen complications with the baby. For us this is truly an answered prayer and in my opinion a miracle because the odds were about 50/50 that something else could be wrong. We feel like we have made it over a very big hurdle and that God has truly blessed us but we do still have a long road ahead.

Right now we are still trying to come to terms with what this means but know that God has a plan and has chosen us to be this little guys parents for a very special reason. What this all means for us is that nothing about delivering this little guy or his first few months of life are going to be normal. With in the first 3 to 7 days of his life our baby will require an open heart surgery to repair the defect that he has. The Navy hospital across the street from our house where we thought we would be delivering will not be able to perform this surgery. Since this is one of the more rare heart defects we are currently looking at either going to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) or Duke Children's. For us going to Duke would be like going home but CHOP is the #1 Children's hospital in the US, which is pretty hard to turn down. Once we decided where we will be going I will more then likely go to that area around 35-36 weeks (the end of October) to be near the hospital for weekly appointments, etc. After the baby is born we will more then likely be whereever we go for about another month depending on how the baby is doing and how the surgery goes.

We ask that you pray for our sweet little boy and that he continues to grow strong while in the womb. We ask that you pray for us for daily strength to deal with whatever may come our way as we deal with all of this. We ask that you pray for the doctors that will be delivering the baby and for the doctors and nursery that will do the surgery and take care of him after. We feel so blessed to have such amazing friends to be able to share with and to ask to pray for us.