So, 20 weeks. Theoretically half way but I refuse to acknowledge that bullshit. You aren’t even pregnant for the first two weeks, so there’s no way they should count. I would further argue that the following two weeks shouldn’t count either because pretty much everyone spends them in blissful ignorance of conception. I myself recall drinking some beer in week 3 just case I turned out to be pregnant and didn’t get to have any more for a while.

Anyways, at 20 weeks, you get to have the big ultrasound. I slunk out of work early on Wednesday and when to the hospital, where Z and I were harassed by recruiters for medical studies until it was our turn. Then an untalkative technician scanned my belly for awhile pointing out various fetus parts… kidneys, creepy alien eye sockets, a foot, kidneys again, a spine… At one point she left to show something to a doctor, then came back in and kept scanning. And then told us we were all done.

Today the midwives called to say that the report from the hospital notes an appearance “suggestive of an anomaly of the urogenital tract” on one kidney. If I consent, they’d like to scan again in 3 weeks.

And that’s it. The midwife seemed a little surprised that no-one had mentioned anything to us at the hospital. And I’m a little surprised too. This information would be so much less scary if we had ANY IDEA what kind of “suggestion of an anomaly” it is, what it could potentially mean, how common it is, and how often it doesn’t indicate any problem at all.

Dr. Google, drunk as usual, tells me that some fetal kidney abnormalities seen on scans turn out to be fine, others require antibiotic treatment of the newborn, others indicate Down’s syndrome, while the complete absence of kidneys means the kid dies. For once, Dr. Google actually calmed me down because 1) I don’t think the fetus is completely missing kidneys, since the cryptic note from the hospital specified one weird kidney, not two; and 2) somewhere on the internet it says that, if weird kidneys indicate genetic problems like Down’s syndrome, other markers are usually visible as well. We just got one weird kidney.

The other stuff? Antibiotics? Surgery? Everything being fine? We can handle those outcomes.

But I am still definitely going to spend the next three weeks worrying about this until we have more information. And being kind of pissed off that nobody bothered explaining anything to either us or our midwife. They were probably all busy saving lives or something, but it’s still a drag.

Oh, and it’s a boy. It’s what everyone guessed, including me. Whenever I feel a passing twinge of regret that I don’t get to dress this kid in frilly dresses, I just think about shaggy little boy hair, overalls and little checkered shirts with pearlescent buttons.

Based on the genetics involved, the baby is expected to look pretty much like Raggedy Andy.

It’s neat to be able to refer to this kid with a gendered pronoun. Maybe we’ll even come up with a name one of these days.