6 + 6 = 12

Yep, that's our new due date. 06/06/12.

You may be wondering why...well, here it goes. First, everything is fine still. We had another BPP and doppler this morning and everything looked great. No worries there. Take a deep breath, everyone.

As some of you may know, IUGR is a strange beast. Lots of people with IUGR have answers for discrepency in size - like preeclampsia in the mother, infections in mama or baby, chromosomal disorders, etc etc. Lots of different things can cause problems.  Still, in a lot of cases, no cause can ever be determined and so that makes it difficult to know how to proceed. In some cases, the baby is just plain small. To quote Ben, "That's the way God made it."

We are still crossing the line between baby is just plain small and baby has an issue that we just don't know about. Almost all the literature in IUGR states that if baby is doing well (passing all BPP's, growing, blood flow looks good), you may proceed to between 37-39 weeks gestation. Well, that's confusing if you can get that far...because how far should you go? Should you go to 37 weeks and just take the baby out then (and deal with the baby OUTSIDE of the womb, perhaps in the NICU or other nursery type setting)? Or should you wait until 39 in hopes that nothing bad happens INSIDE the womb (like death...)? See, it's confusing.

Last week was our growth scan. Obviously the baby grew (or else she would already be out of me). She grew 3 weeks worth of growth and was measuring something like 32 weeks 6 days - (4 lbs 2 oz). That is a 3 week growth in 3 weeks; however, it wasn't enough to keep her on the 3rd percentile and she dropped percentiles to the 1st percentile.

We have two different sets of doctors that we see. We see an OB (Dr. Horton) and have seen him regularly since 16 weeks gestation. It's been awesome to have the same doctor every single time (highly unusual for the type of practice Emory is set up to be). We also see MFM (maternal fetal medicine) specialists, who are consultants (more specialized) to an OB. They are the doom and gloom OB's. They tell you your baby is going to die or that they will be messed up or whatever. They aren't the happy OB's. And that's ok - there is a need for that for sure.

Well, the MFM's at Emory are in the conservative camp. Get the baby out sooner than risk stillbirth. The OB's are not quite that conservative - if everything looks good, keep baby inside. Obviously, this puts us in a tough position. We were previously scheduled for delivery for June 13th (which would have been exactly 39 weeks), but today that MFM fellow (who was out of vacation last week at our growth scan and we had a different one that day) was shocked and basically told us we were "playing with fire" by delaying delivery. The MFM told us to go home and decided what we wanted to do (which I think is stupid....how can Brad and I make this decision?!?). So, we got good ole Dr. Horton to come and see us and we basically talked it over and split the difference. He could see we were anxious about it. We have never called him and not been problem patients except for this one time today. It was apparent that this is the right thing to do and we were all happy about it.

So 6/6/12. Mark your calendars. Here comes another Mitchell!