Chorionic Villus Sampling: CVS
As for my personal experience with you, feel free to read below.
If you are squeamish or if you might be in for this soon and only want happy pie in the sky experiences then please stop reading.
In fact! Disclaimer - if you are looking for super happy bubbly bullshit pregnancy stories you may want to just skip the rest of my pregnancy #4 re-hash. (my guess is you wouldn't have found my blog if you are that type though)
I digress....
Even with pregnancy #3 I knew that a CVS would be in my future, I never made it that far. So this was the first time I had to go through it.
I was scared shitless for multiple reasons. The first being the most obvious. I was terrified that the outcome would be negative. The others involved fear of the pain, fear of the chance of miscarriage caused by the procedure, etc.
I had the procedure done at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, part of Stanford. I really couldn't have been in a better place which was great! I was super nervous and ended up having to wait over an hour later than my appointment for some stupid reason. I was told to hold my pee for the procedure, and pregnancy + holding pee + one hour overtime = pissy patient.
I assumed going into it that the procedure would be done vaginally, as opposed to more of an amnio type procedure (needle through belly). I guess it all depends on where your placenta is located at the time of the procedure. Mine ended up being very low so they went in vaginally. It was a HUGE relief because I had been terrified that they would have to go through my belly because I figured that would hurt like a bitch.
HA! vaginally hurt like a crazy bitch. Like trying not to sound like a total wuss and gripping Cameron's hand until he was like "WTF ow!". For some weird reason I didn't expect it to hurt, well, now I know better. So here is my fair warning to anyone out there needing one of those!
The coolest part about the procedure is that it took about an hour* (which is btw WAY longer than I expected it to take) but I had a great view of baby/placenta during the whole thing because they have to follow the catheter in and make sure they hit the placenta, etc.
We were told results would take 2-3 weeks to get back. It was an agonizingly long wait. They mentioned occasionally it is really fast and so every single day I was waiting for a call, I called in once a week to make sure they didn't forget about me.
Finally I got the call that everything was ok. As mentioned in previous blog post, I was obviously going through some issues so it wasn't as dramatically awesome as I wish it had been. But whatever, the end result was good so I'll give myself a pass on not being all magical daydreamy about it.
*The actual procedure was very fast, maybe 5 minutes, and by procedure I mean insertion of the catheter to retrieve a piece of placenta. The entire time in the office was about an hour. 30 minutes spent finding the location of placenta/baby, determining which way to go in (exterior or interior) then the prepping the procedure, tools, my vagina, etc. Then performing the act, then looking around to make sure they didn't do any damage. Inspecting the sample tissue to make sure they got what they needed and had enough. Then I had to wait in a recovery area for a while to make sure I didn't have any contractions/cramping, and I'm RH- so I needed a Rogam shot.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.