The never ending toxo crisis

Well, almost immediately after I posted yesterday about my questions/decision to get down the pregnancy books despite the unresolved toxo issue, Mr.Right called. My OB had called him as he was leaving the office. She was, she said, flabbergasted that this was happening to us, after all we'd been through. Ugh. I totally appreciate her compassion, but I had just really hoped she'd be saying, "look, this is absolutely nothing to worry about. It's almost certainly a false positive."

But no, that's not to be. So, first of all, the blood I had drawn last Wednesday for a quantitative titer? Somebody goofed. The order went in for qualitative (i.e. negative or positive) not quantitative. The bad news: IgM still positive. IgG still negative. The other bad news? She looked back in my records and I had had a toxo screen done last June at my first OB appointment for the Trisomy 18 pregnancy. Both IgG and IgM negative then.

Which means, almost certainly I've been exposed sometime between last June and 2 weeks ago. Great.

Mr.Right insisted that the next move be that we send my blood to the reference laboratory in Palo Alto. (If you're curious about what a reference laboratory is and some good information about toxoplasmosis, see here.) I went to my OB's office mid-morning today to get blood drawn for this. If their lab gets its act together and gets the sample to the Palo Alto lab by noon tomorrow, so says the website, they could have verbal interpretation for my doc by 3 p.m. on Friday. We'll see about that. I'm thinking we're looking at sometime next week. It doesn't really matter that much. We're still waiting for the full CVS results to get back sometime Mon through Thurs next week too.

In addition, my OB was going to talk to one of the MFM docs at the hospital when she was there today. This MFM doc happens to be the one that had to walk into the room, never having met us before, and give us the news that our baby last July had a massive cystic hygroma, massive nuchal fold and probably almost certainly was chromosomally abnormal. Sigh. My OB was going to ask Dr.MFM what she thought about the toxo thing.

Since I'm now finishing this post later in the afternoon, I know that that conversation did happen as my OB then called Mr.Right this afternoon to report on the conversation. I got Mr.Right's email about this just as I was getting in the car after a lunch meeting downtown today. Basically, Dr.MFM said she'd never seen a case of toxo and she's got to be, like, 50 years old, because it's so rare in the US. She said she'd be concerned if I'd been in France and eaten steak tartar 20 times. So, she thinks it's a false positive in all likelihood.

But the logician in me can't quite wrap my head around that. Why would my IgM now show positive when it showed negative back in June? What explains that?

Anyhow, one of the courses of action when monitoring for toxo infection in the fetus is to have frequent ultrasounds to monitor for physical abnormalities (hydrocephalus being one). So, the plan is to make an appointment with Dr.MFM for around March 28, 29 when we should definitely have the Palo Alto results back and go in for an ultrasound. If there's any silver lining in all of this, the idea of frequent high-quality ultrasounds is definitely music to an infertile/RPL'ers ears :-)

Ok, ok. I know that even *if* I contracted this infection in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy there's a less than 15% chance (we read one stat that said 6% chance at 13 weeks) of having passed it to the baby.

I just don't trust that we won't take the statistical bullet again. We seem to be pretty adept at getting the short end of the stick on all of these statistics (including the IVF success rate stats.)

I missed a bunch of hours of sleep last night again. But I found myself thinking today, 'well, this is how it is. You have a bad night. Maybe you don't sleep. But you get up the next morning and move on. You go about your day (lunch with work contact today) and you make it through." So, that's what I'm doing.

I'm trying very, very hard to think about falling on the right side of the statistics and not about being the bizarre (apparently) single occurrence of toxoplasmosis in a pregnant woman in the US this year. It might make for a fascinating case study for some MFM journal, but I'd really rather not be famous.