The New Deal(s).

Greetings! Guest blogger Rus here. Remember how I said the story changes as new information comes in? Well, it’s Monday, we’ve spent the weekend here at Kaiser, and the morning started with Dr. Walton coming in to see us. He’d come in on Friday (his day off) and called in on Saturday, which was nice. Now it was time to get down to brass tacks... only not so brassy, and less tack than post-it note that’s been used way too often and doesn’t have much glue left.

Basically, he discussed the situation with us, and we came to the decision to schedule a c-section for late this week, Thursday or Friday, depending on how Neonatal ICU (NICU, pronounced “nee-que”) was set up, the staff situation (not the crew who couldn’t get out of weekend duty, perhaps?), things like that. Barring incident, Wyatt was coming out at 33 weeks. Done.

Then we went and had our follow-up uber-ultrasound. We really should’ve done that first.

The new ultrasound showed that Stephanie’s low amniotic fluid was still low, but not as low; she’d gone from “4 points” (however that’s calculated) to “5.1 points.” What’s “0.1” point? No idea. They were about to call it “4.6,” which is what we had on Saturday, but then Wyatt moved and they found a BIG new fluid pocket (possibly owing to a bladder that was full, then empty). His kidneys and flow from the chord were both excellent... everything looked good, apparently. Add to that he hadn’t had another major deceleration since Friday, that he’s moving well, that his monitor strips look grand, and suddenly the Thursday-Friday plan looked a little shaky.

(Again, new information: we found out yesterday that Wyatt’s “baseline” heart rate is 150, which seems high to me from the numbers that flash on the monitor; if he goes down to the 120-130 range for several minutes, that’s technically a deceleration, but the ones that make doctors and nurses come rushing in are double-digit numbers.)

So now, the NEW-new plan is a lot more vague. We still might have a planned c-section (the goal is now to avoid an emergency c-section) towards the end of the week, but we’ll also see if conditions are still stable/improving slightly, and if that’s the case, we might just go a few more days. Dr. Walton refers to it as “brinksmanship,” which is normally one of my favorite words, but given how stable Wyatt seems to be at the moment - certainly, nothing alarming has happened in days - it feels like overstatement at this stage. Certainly, “brinksmanship” will become more accurate somewhere down the line, when the new information coming in isn't as good as today's.

Stephanie and I talked about it a bit, and for some reason, we seem to be aiming for 34 weeks... that would be a week past what we were looking at this morning. Why? We don’t know. Obviously, every day we can keep him safely inside is good, but for some reason, 34 weeks lowers our anxiety exponentially from 33 weeks.

Will we get there? Check back in eleven days.