Part Five

To this day, I still don't know how to feel about the sonogram lady. She knew full well that we were going straight into the exam room and getting bad news, yet she kept up her jovial demeanor, and printed out all those pictures for us. Of course, it's not her job to give out the news, and it's not her fault that we brought half our family with us into the sonogram. But still. I don't know if I'd have wanted her to give some hints that all was not well, maybe frown a little and say, "Hmmm." No, that probably would have provoked lots of anxious questions and demands for more information. But maybe she could have been a little less, "Wooh, active little bugger! Here's the nose. Let's try to get a picture in profile!", you know? Not let us get up quite so high, so the crash seemed that much harder. I don't know, maybe this isn't a fair criticism. The crash was going to be hard no matter what.

We got back to our house and my mom and I talked about what we'd just heard. She's a nurse, used to be a pediatric ICU nurse back in the day, so she's good to have around when something medical is going on. She can give no-nonsense information, knows what questions to ask. We talked and she said, "Well, that's really not good, honey. There's really no way to survive without all four chambers of the heart." Yeah. I knew that, of course I knew that. But knowing and knowing are two different things. Hearing it out loud made it impossible to ignore. I started crying all over again. Well, maybe it's not as bad as all that. Maybe they just couldn't see well enough, like the OB said. Maybe the level 2 sonogram will show us that things aren't as bad as they seem. One can always hope.

After a bit, I decided, like I always decide, to arm myself with information. I needed to know what keywords to search for, so I opened the envelope with the medical records and started reading. I got to the page with the sonogram lady's report and saw, handwritten at the bottom of the page, "only 3 chambers present", but also, "multiple omphalocele", and "massive hydrocephale". Underlined.

Blink.

What? I didn't know what "omphalocele" meant yet, though I could guess, but I sure knew what "hydrocephale" meant. And "massive"?! The OB had mentioned nothing about this. Not one word. And these notes didn't indicate that they, "couldn't really tell what was going on", like the OB said. These notes stated exactly what was going on. There's no ambiguity in "massive hydrocephale". I was...in shock. Panicked. Outraged! I called Orion over and read it all to him, nearly hysterical. Hands shaking, tears streaming, voice rising. I couldn't believe that they (she) hadn't told us all this. How could they send us home with this information and not tell us about it first?! What? Did they think a manila envelope was going to keep me from reading my own medical records?! I called the OBs office back and told them that we were coming back in and I wanted to see her, immediately.

Orion and I drove back over to the office. To their credit, I think the nurses knew I was not to be fucked with any longer and they brought us straight in and didn't hassle us at all. The nurse who escorted us back to the exam room asked a few questions, but I think the medical records I was clutching in my shaking hands told her enough. The OB came in a couple of minutes later and said, "So, I understand you're upset?" Un. Fucking. Believable.

"Yeah, I'm upset. You told us you 'had some concerns' about the sonogram results, but what I read here goes way beyond that. This says 'multiple omphalocele", 'massive hydrocephale'! That all sounds dire! What is going on..."

I went on like that for a while. She told us that, in her experience, it's best to ease people into the news. Not give them too much at once. Plus, she said, they really don't know exactly what's going on. She actually said, "We don't really know what a normal 17 week old brain should look like." What?! Bullshit! Bullshit. This is what they do. They see sonograms at this stage all the time! All the time. They know full well what normal looks like. She just didn't want to be the one to give us the bad news, the dire prognosis. She was totally fobbing us off on the perinatologist. Let them deal with the grieving couple. She just wouldn't admit it. Coward.

I burned through my anger talking to her. Burnt off all the adrenaline. An exhausted sadness settle in. I wanted her to admit that things looked dismal. She still kept insisting that they wouldn't know until after the level 2 sonogram. Of course, our appointment was over a week away. I asked if there was any way we could get an earlier appointment. I just couldn't wait that long. I started crying in earnest again, pleading. She agreed to try, and left. The nurse came back in a bit and said that the absolute earliest they could get us in was in four days. We numbly took our appointment slip and left.