Having an Amniocentesis

"Let's fly!" Sheldon exclaimed as soon as he walked in the house.  "It only costs $21 to fly to Tucson!"

"$21 dollars one way, or for both ways?" I asked sceptically, sure it couldn't be that cheap. 

"One way," he admitted, "but still, that's only $42 a person, and that's not bad."

I'd known before he even went down to the travel agency that he would say we should fly.  Sheldon loved a party, an adventure, any chance to do something fun.  There was no way he would pass up on a chance to fly down to Tucson when there was a good reason to go.  For that matter, neither would I.  I'd only flown once, coming home from Oregon, and I wanted to do it again, too.

I was expecting our fourth baby.  I'd had three previous miscarriages, one I'd been so far along that I'd hemorrhaged and had to have an emergency D&C.  They had done tests and found that instead of having two genes in every pair, that baby had three.  The doctor said it was possible I might have carried the baby full term, but he would have been still born or died immediately after birth, so they wanted me to have an amniocentesis this time to make sure everything was OK.

I really liked my personal doctor, but I wasn't impressed with the gene specialist.  When my doctor explained about the testing I questioned why. 

"Even if the tests came back showing something is wrong I won't have an abortion," I told him. 

He smiled understandingly and said, "I know that.  I'm not saying you should.  But getting these tests done will help us make better decisions on how to help you and the baby.  There's probably nothing wrong, but if there is we should be prepared.  You know, it's Heavenly Father who has inspired and given us this advanced medical knowledge, and if we choose not to use it we are not taking advantage of the gifts he has given us."

That made sense so I agreed to the tests, but I was nervous.  I didn't relish the idea of someone sticking a six inch needle into my stomach to draw amniotic fluid from the baby's amniotic sac. The medical center at the University of Arizona in Tucson was the only place they did this procedure, and since I was already four months along it was important to do it right away.

Sheldon was thrilled as soon as he heard the news.  Not only did it give him a reason to skip work, it sounded like fun, so a few days later we took a small commuter plane from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport to Tucson.  It seemed like we just took off before we landed, in fact the whole flight was only 21 minutes.  I wonder if that's why they charged $21? 

In Tucson we rented a car and went to a hobby shop Sheldon had heard about, then on to the U of A Medical Center. 

The doctor did a Sonogram first.  He saw the baby clearly, and we could see it's head and stomach and hands, the doctor even counted five fingers on one hand.  He said the spine looked fine and he counted four chambers in the heart. The one thing they couldn't see was whether the baby was a girl or a boy, but everything else looked good.

Then the doctor told me he could give me a shot of Novocaine to deaden the area where he would put the needle, but it seemed to me that a shot would hurt just as much as the actual test.  The doctor agreed, so he just did the amniocentesis.  It wasn't nearly as bad I had expected.  It didn't hurt any more than getting a shot in my mouth at the dentists.  In fact, pulling the band-aid off the next day hurt more than the test.

"It will take a couple of weeks to get the test results," the doctor told us.  "We'll even be able to tell you with 99% accuracy if it's a girl or a boy."

"Why won't you be 100% sure?" asked Sheldon. 

"Well, there's always that one in a hundred chance that we actually got a bit of your wife's gene's instead of the baby's, so it would look like a girl when it's really a boy," he explained.  "But that almost never happens."

"So we went through this whole thing for nothing?" Sheldon grumbled as we walked out of the medical center.  But he wasn't really mad.  He'd had a lot of fun on the short trip.  So had I.  It ended up being a really expensive little vacation, $100 for the plane and rental car and $600 for the test after our insurance paid the rest, but it was nice to do something different for a change.

The best part was two weeks later when they called with the results.  Everything was fine, and we were going to have a girl!  (99% positive)  And I already knew what we would call her.  Alyssa!