Great News Today!

Here's an update from today's ultrasound.  Best report yet! 

I completed a round of steroid injections yesterday.  Steroids are given to premature babies if it is looking like delivery may be imminent.  They help the baby produce surfactant, which lines the lungs, so the baby can breathe easier in the "outside world."  For the past two weeks, the doctors have encouraged us to take the steroids, but we had been apprehensive.  You can get up to 2 rounds of steroids in a pregnancy, and the effect wears off within 3 days to a week, so we don't want to miss a window of opportunity.  It's just hard to predict when we'll need it since we don't know how long it will take for things to get bad enough to force a c-section.  Just to be safe, and since we now plan to do everything medically possible to intervene if/when necessary, we bit the bullet and got the steroids on board. 

Well...sometimes the steroids cause a "honeymoon effect," where the blood flow temporarily improves for a few days, up to a week.  We were warned not to get our hopes up because it will likely get worse again when the steroid effect wears off.  Ok, so my hopes aren't up, but I can get "temporarily" excited!  Every measurement they took today was NORMAL!  Woo hoo!  Each visit, we look at three different graphs of plotted points, the ratios and numbers measured in different blood vessels (the umbilical artery, the MCA in the brain, and the ductus in the liver).  Every plotted point, until now, has been off the charts, in the abnormal range, but today, every point fell into the normal range!  It was fun to see.  I know it's only temporary, but with improved blood flow, the baby will get better access to nutrients, and hopefully, he'll grow!  So let's pray hard during this window of opportunity.  I'm also encouraged that if this improvement does last a week, that may mean it buys us that much time before delivery, getting us to 27.5 weeks...closing in on 28 weeks and beyond!