I Would Like To Cry Uncle Now

I haven't answered my phone in about two days.  No texts, no emails.  I've tried to unplug and hide.  

I got some bad news this week.  

On Thursday, about 7 hours before Mike was supposed to come home after a week-long conference, I got a call from my nurse.  They had done my standard OB blood panel on Monday, and she had just gotten the results.  

First, she said, my Progesterone is not looking good.  It's not climbing.  It's not even staying the same.  It's dropping.  So now the dreaded suppositories are gone, and I have to move up.  Two shots, every Tuesday and Friday, right in the butt.  

And that was the good news.

She wanted me to come in to talk about the second part.  She really needed me to understand, and this was going to be hard to hear. 

I have Antibody-D.  No, I don't expect gasps of instant understanding.  Let me explain.  I have a negative blood type.  If you're Rh-negative and pregnant, you have to get a shot during pregnancy that you're told "will keep your baby safe."  That's all they really say.  So I never really thought anything about it.  

This shot apparently keeps you from ending up with antibody-D.  But I got it, most likely from delivering my daughter.  Her blood mixed with mine, and since she's a positive blood type, my body saw her blood as an attack and developed antibodies to attack it.  This is called Rh-sensitivity.  

In four weeks, they will test my blood again, and count the antibodies.  If they keep multiplying, I have Rh-disease.

Rh-disease causes anemia in the baby.  The mother's blood attacks the baby's, and destroys the red blood cells.  So they have to do an amnio to find out the baby's blood type, then do more amnios to keep an eye on the red blood count.  If it gets bad, the baby gets blood transfusions.  

(How the hell do you give a baby a blood transfusion in-utero?) 

If this is what killed Carpenter (which we may never know), there is an 80% chance this will happen to Little M.  Eighty percent.

It's possible this is what killed my son.  It is possible I don't have anything wrong with me.  But either way, I cannot retest for four weeks.  I have to live with this information for a month, and there's nothing I can do about it. 

I call uncle.  But since I know the world isn't going to let up any time soon, I'm just going to crawl into bed now and pretend everything is okay until the sun comes up.