Baby Update

Baby Girl Guptill - 28 weeks

I'm just over 28 weeks now and the baby has just been diagnosed with Intrauterine Growth Restriction.  It's nothing that we didn't know before, pretty much it just means the baby is small but they wanted to have several ultrasounds at different times to gather different data points before they actually diagnose as IUGR.  8 weeks ago the baby was under the 1st percentile (less than 1%) in size.  4 weeks ago she was just under the 5th percentile.  And yesterday she was at the 9th percentile.  So she is catching up. The cutoff for IUGR is 10th percentile, so she just missed it.  Her head was actually measuring normal, but her femur was smaller so it threw things off.
So now I will go in for monitoring three times a week and at least one of the weekly appointments will be in St. Louis, which I'm not that excited about.  They will be checking her all the time to make sure she is getting enough oxygen and nutrients and continuing to grow.

I've done a lot of testing over the past 8 weeks and they haven't found anything wrong with the baby other than that she is small, so that is good.  And my placenta is now a normal size (it used to be slightly large which is bad and could indicate its not working properly - normal size is good).  I'm told if the baby gets up to over the 10th percentile I may be able to stop the close monitoring (3 weekly appointments), so I'm hoping she can grow just a little bigger.  Mostly I'm hoping nothing is really wrong with her.

The doctors will be watching closely to see if I need to deliver early.  Since I'm over 28 weeks now I'm in a relatively safer timeframe for early delivery.  Still not ideal to have a baby so early, but the baby has a much better chance now if we did have to have her early.

So we are still hoping she will grow more and everything will be ok.  I feel her moving all the time now so that is good!!  Thinking good thoughts!!