Testing to Prepare
At the end of the 1st trimester and the beginning of the 2nd you are able to do multiple tests to tell you specific things about your baby. Some of these things include gender, chromosome count, spina bifida, and much more. You are presented the option to get these test done around the 10-18 week mark and they take about 2 weeks to come in.
Some people don’t feel the need and choose not to do these genetic tests. For some, the anxiety of knowing it and living with that for the next 20 weeks is torture and they would rather find out when the baby is born. That was not me. I needed to know these answers and I needed to prepare. If things came back a certain way I wanted to have all the knowledge that I could in my corner and adjust how our lives may need to be.
Prior to finding out we were having twins I was team green. I didn’t want to know the gender and wanted to be old school where my husband would be the one to tell me and all our family what the baby was. The moment we found out we were having twins, that all changed and I needed to know. There was so much more to prep for. Double the clothes, double the items, and double the name decisions!
At my 15 week appointment they asked if I wanted to get genetic testing done and the extra test for spina bifida. I had already talked with my husband prior and told him I wanted to do it, but when the moment came I kinda froze a bit. Turning to him and confirming, yes we wanted to get this done, we told the doctor yes please!
*Note, at this appointment we got an ultrasound where they could confidently tell what the gender of the babies were! We had the tech put the gender pictures in an envelope so that we could do a private gender reveal. The next post will be all about finding out the genders of our babies.
Typically they don’t offer the spina bidifa test unless you have a history, are high risk, or technically a geriatric pregnancy. It wasn't even one I knew about, but wanted to have done as well once they explained it. The more we could pretest for felt like knowledge in our pocket so we could be prepared to be all these babies needed.
We got the blood drawn and were at a waiting point. They told us the spina bifida test would come back in up to a week, but the genetic would take at least 2. We ended up getting the spinda bifida test back in 3 days and thank goodness it was negative! Something that I wasn't even worried about at the beginning, but became very concerned with once we knew about the testing'.
Two weeks seemed to drag on while waiting for the genetic testing to come back. We knew the genders based on the ultrasound, but wanted confirmation from the testing. Also we had a pit in our stomach not knowing if the genetics would come back positive or negative for abnormalities. The day that the email showed up in my inbox, I fought the urge to open it without my husband next to me. Once he got home we opened the email…
Gender… confirmed….
Genetic abnormalities… negative..
As guilty as I felt and still feel thinking and saying it, a HUGE weight was lifted off my shoulders when we read negative on the abnormalities. I wish I could explain why there was a guilty feeling when I felt relief that there was no abnormalities, but I can’t really put it into words. I think there was a part of me that was scared things would be so much harder. I had no idea how we were going to handle it, but knew we could if that is what God intended.
It is okay to be scared to find out answers to big things like a genetic test, or answers to anything really. If you get a pit in your stomach thinking about it, or you can feel your heart beating out of your chest it just means you are human and care a lot! We all want good news all the time, we would prefer it, but in the case of bad news or not ideal news, it is how you handle it and proceed.
No matter what the results would have been for us it would not have changed our love for these babies! Now in a few weeks we hit another big ‘test’ that is the anatomy scan!
