The Diagnosis is What Counts

What a crazy morning we've had! But I'll get to that in a minute; the important thing is that the ultrasound showed that things are looking really good this week!

The CVR is down to .73. I can't believe it! That's half of what it was last week, not to mention it's the lowest number we've seen. This is the first time we've seen the mass shrink without the help of steroids. Very encouraging.

So our crazy morning was this: I dropped Carter off and preschool, dropped Logan off at Vassars' house, and picked up Jeff at the place where we'd agreed to meet. It was tight, but I got everyone where they needed to be, and we got to the appointment on time. And then we waited. We checked to be sure they knew we were there. And we waited some more. After waiting almost 40 minutes, just as we were discussing whether or not we'd actually have time to do the ultrasound, we were called in. The lady who put our info into the ultrasound computer was having trouble and had to do it twice. The lady who did our ultrasound was super fast, but after it was done, she had to come back to take some more pictures because of some computer trouble. Then the doctor came in and we discussed the results. We needed to set up more appointments, so we stopped by the desk on our way out, but there were more computer problems. After getting one appointment in, we decided that we NEEDED to go, so we left her to set up the rest and call us with the times. I drove Jeff back to his car, and then headed to preschool to pick up Carter. I got there five minutes late, collected Carter, and we were off to pick up Logan and head home for lunch. I can't tell you how glad I am to be home and not have any deadlines for the rest of the day!

I wish I'd been able to process this week's info and talk to the doctor a bit more. I still can't figure out exactly what the CVR number means--even though the number has gone down by half, it was apparent that the mass isn't half the size that it was. It still takes up the better part of the left side of his chest. I guess it really doesn't matter for now. The important thing is that things are looking good. I'll ask questions next week. The doctor did tell us that we will continue to do ultrasounds weekly for now, but if we see a pattern of shrinkage, we might be able to back off a bit. I hope so: Next week we have our ultrasound on Monday and a Fetal Echocardiogram on Wednesday. The week after that, I have a midwife visit (with the one-hour glucose test), a pediatric surgery consult, and an ultrasound. After that, I'll probably be wanting a bit of a break from appointments. :)