Follow Up

Tuesday was my last ultrasound appointment with the perinatologist. I guess for those that are wondering I'll explain what a perinatologist is. A perinatologist is an OB doctor that has specialized in monitoring and caring for high risk pregnancies. That's ALL they do, so they are very good at doing what they do.

Anyway, since my first diagnostic ultrasound with the perinatologist showed that Jeffrey appeared to only have one kidney, I had follow-up ultrasounds with the perinatologist just to make sure that everything else was going okay.

They check the bone growth, head growth, heart, kidney function, umbilical cord function, placenta, and level of amniotic fluid. Every time I have gone to my follow up appointments, everything else has checked out fine.

This last time the perinatologist did mention that they will probably want to do an ultrasound on Jeffrey after he is born just to make sure there really is only one kidney. So, I suppose that even if everything is fine when Jeffrey is born, they may want to monitor him in the NICU just to be sure everything really is fine. I don't anticipate it being a long visit though. Nothing like when Hazel was in the NICU for a month.

This last time we went, you could see so many details on what Jeffrey looks like. We could see his little face so clearly it was almost like looking at the pictures people get with a 3D ultrasound. The kids were with us, so I was really glad that they got to see that. You could also see on the bones the difference between bone and where muscle was. The heart was amazing to see as well.

I guess for me it was especially interesting because I could correlate what I was seeing on the screen with all the things I learned about the body when I took anatomy and physiology so many years ago. It was just so cool!