My wife found out that she was pregnant shortly before I took off for my Ph.D. residency in Florida at the end of December. However, I wouldn’t learn about it until I returned. It was the happiest moment of our marriage. She filmed me as I fumbled through a bag of clues, with the last clue being a onesie with “I poo’d” on it. I remember sitting there on the bed in disbelief, asking her if this was a joke.

We would go to our first doctor appointment a few weeks later to make sure everything is okay with the baby. By the time the second one came around by week 10, that’s when things started to go downhill. While the doctor is taking measurements of the baby during the sonogram, I noticed that he kept focusing on one measurement. “Did the nurse already get your blood?” asked the physician. My wife responds in the affirmative. “I’d like to speak to you both about the sonogram. Just come to my office when you’re ready.” I had a feeling something was wrong, but I lacked the knowledge at the time to understand what it was.

The doctor started telling us about Down syndrome and how it corresponds to the measurement of the nuchal translucency. The happiness of our pregnancy had just been snatched from under us as we were told that a nuchal translucency of 1.5mm is normal; our baby’s was 3.9mm. “There’s a chance everything is fine, but you should probably see a specialist.” He said this as he wrote out a piece of paper that would introduce us to our next doctor. “We should have your results back for the Harmony Prenatal Test For Trisomy 21, 18 and 13 in two weeks.”

The waiting game. No one wants to play the waiting game. It’s like torture. You sit there wondering if everything is okay. You want answers, but you cannot get them. With overwhelming optimism, I tell myself and my wife that everything is okay. It would only be a few days later that we would be in the specialists office.

“What do you understand about the measurement of the nuchal translucency and why your doctor had you to come in here?”, the doctor asks. My wife repeats everything her other doctor told her about Down syndrome and heart defects, about the nuchal translucency being a certain size, and how it is just a diagnostic tool. We were there to get another measurement, but we also ended up getting a Chorionic Villus Sampling (CVS). It wasn’t planned, but the window for getting one would end in two days.

CVS is a diagnostic test for identifying chromosome abnormalities and other inherited disorders. It can either be done through the cervix (transcervical) or the abdomen (transabdominal), all while using ultrasound as a guide. My wife’s blood pressure shot through the roof, and her heart rate is about 150 bpm while they are taking her vital signs before the procedure. They took a needle about a foot long and inserted it through my wife’s abdomen and manually used a pump to get a small sample of placenta.

When they measured the baby’s nuchal translucency again, it was in the high normal range, to the relief of both of us. “Baby, did you see the numbers?”, I asked excitedly. She took three measurements, and two of them were significantly less. It was 2.5mm. That’s a lot different than the 3.9mm, I thought. After all, nine out of 10 babies with a measurement between 2.5mm and 3.5mm will be completely fine. There’s no way we could statistically be 10. We left out of the room with an order for bed rest of the next two days for my wife and were told we would have the first set of results back within 24 hours.