Olivia Grace

I am starting this blog as Kate and I begin a new journey in our lives.  We ask for your prayers as we use this blog as a tool to both keep you updated and hopefully touch the lives of those who may follow on our path.  With your prayers and the Grace of God we will endure.  Here is our story.

As most of you know, Kate is 20 weeks pregnant.  Last Monday we had a sonogram and were joyed to find out we were having a little girl.  We were blessed with a little boy 14 months ago and a girl made everything perfect.  That sonigram did come with some worries.  Kate was diagnosed with having a two vessel ambilical cord.  Most ambilical cords have one vein and two arteries.  Kate's only has one vein and one artery.  Dr. Ricks said this is more common than we think and happens in about 1% of every pregnancy.  20% of two cord babies have midline defects, usually found in the heart or kidneys.  He sent us to Cooks Childerens Hosptial to have a level two sonogram to further check things out.  Kate and I prayed hoping for the best.

Thursday, we went in for our level two sonogram.  The doctor spent a long time looking at everything in much detail.  When finished, he broke the news to us.  We had multiple issues we are dealing with.  First, is a deformity of the hands.  One of her hands has fingers that seem to be overlapping.  Second, She has vsd, ventricular septal defect.  Basically is a hole  seperating two chambers of the heart.  Lastly, she has a dialation of the thrid ventricle which is believed to be causing agenesis of the corpus callosum.  This is a cist that seperates her left and right hemispheres of her brain.  It causes the nerves that connect the two hemispheres to go undeveloped.  Basically, the 2 sides of her brain can't communicate with each other.  She is also a week and half behind in her size and weight.  All of this lead to a diagnosis of a chromosone disorder.  He believed it is Trisomy 18.  We had an amniocentisis to confer. It will take a couple days to get the results.

Trisomy 18 is a chromosone defect where the 18th chromosone has pulled in an extra chromosone upon development.  Our doctor described this as a fatal  diagnosis.  80% of all trisomy 18 cases don't make it to birth.  10% are stillbirth and the other 10% usually live anywhere between a matter of hours to a matter of days.  An occasional case that shows few defects can live a few years, but that is very rare.  We get the results for this and other disorders on Monday evening. 

This brings us to our feeling and prayers.  Kate and I have shed many tears, prayed together constantly, and have talked through every possibility.  Our hearts were broken when we got the news.  No one ever thinks something like this will happen to them.  You feel helpless and constantly question why.  Through your prayers, the support of our families and through the blessing we have with Maddox we will prevail.  We are taking this one step at a time.  We ask for your prayers for our baby girl, Olivia Grace Bryan.  For through the Grace of God we will get through this.