Gimli, son of Gloin

It took me a little longer than expected to update on our ultrasound yesterday--sorry for keeping all of you in suspense. It takes some time and energy to process news like this and I just didn't feel up to writing about it last night after our long day. But now that I've had a good night's rest (and a late morning thanks to Lyle letting me sleep in) I will do my best to share our news with you.

So there is our little baby at 7 weeks 4 days. He (or she) was measuring 8 weeks 2 days, which the RE explained has a +/- 6 day variance, so the baby was basically measuring right on target. There was a nice strong heartbeat of 160bpm. So on that end little Gimli (extra points if you know that reference, Lyle nicknamed the baby yesterday and it seems to be sticking) is looking pretty good.

The problem is...well, there is a problem. From this angle you can see a darker area underneath the gestational sac (if you click on the photo to go to my flickr I have things labeled there if you need help seeing it). That darker area is fluid, usually blood, and the white line between the fluid and the sac is placenta. The RE said the placenta right there is very thin and sometimes what can happen with a collection of fluid like that is that it grows and can eventually cause the placenta to detach, leading to miscarriage. This is usually related to blood clottings disorders, which makes sense with the whole MTHFR thing. This definitely leads me to believe that something like this was probably the cause of my last two miscarriages (for some reason I always think of my first miscarriage before Josh in a different category, perhaps because it was so early and so different while these last 2 were very similar).

The RE assured me that this area of fluid was small (although to me it looks huge, as big as the baby! I suppose it is relative and he has probably seen far larger collections of fluid in other cases) and would normally not concern him at all if it wasn't for my history. We have another appointment for an ultrasound in two weeks to check on this again. Hopefully our baby will still be doing okay and this area of fluid will be smaller or may even disappear.

I have to admit that this concerns me a lot. In two weeks I will be close to the time when my last two babies stopped growing. I have to wonder if I had an u/s this early with either of those two pregnancies would I have seen the same thing I am seeing now? Maybe in those cases the collection of fluid was even bigger and so now I am doing better? Or maybe this is happening all over again and in around two weeks the placenta will detach and my baby will die and I will have another dead baby.

So here I sit with another two week wait to see if my baby is going to live or die. There is nothing I can do but wait and try to keep myself busy, try to think positive and try to hold onto hope. I honestly wish I could've either gotten all good news or all bad news. I would just like to know, am I going to have this baby or not? But the sitting here and not knowing, seeing a strong healthy baby growing but seeing this lurking problem in my uterus that could kill my baby...well, it's hard to deal with.

So my question for all of my IF/loss pals is do any of you know more about this? Has anyone had an area of fluid under the placenta like this and things turned out okay? Anyone had this and things were not okay? My doctor definitely seemed to think it was not a huge concern and he just wants to give me all of the information and be honest with me. I do trust him, but at the same time I have been through this too many times and am too much of a realist to see something like this and just brush it off like it is not concerning. And like he said, I do have that history. Without it we would shrug it off, but with my history of miscarriage and MTHFR, well this could be the beginning of the end for this baby.