The folks at California Pacific Medical Center must have felt our pain and rushed our first trimester screening blood labs through the system because it was less than a week later that they called with the results -- our odds for both Trisomy 18 and Trisomy 21 were very very low. Lower odds than normal for someone my age. Those are the results you want -- ones that are better than those for your age group. And mine were actually quite a lot better than for my age group, a gigantic relief.
But because our odds for our age were 1 in 441 for Trisomy 18 the first time around and I was feeling particularly cursed, David and I still both wanted to do the Chorionic villus sampling (CVS).
So I went in on a Wednesday afternoon to get my blood drawn for the antibodies test. There is a long, painful story of bureaucracy and institutional incompetence associated with my effort to get this blood test completed and results back in time for the next CVS appointment. It involves many phone calls to the lab to make sure my doctor had the right code number to indicate the right test. It involves the lab outsourcing the actual processing of the sample to another lab (they call this a reference lab). And it involves them sending the sample but not sending the required paperwork to the so-called reference lab.
I remember, after having my blood drawn, wishing that I could just follow my blood sample around through the whole process so I could tell everyone of the urgency of the timing. I told everyone I spoke with about the urgency. But I did not speak to everyone who handled my sample, and sometimes messages like that just aren't passed along.
You see, I was getting to the end of the window when I could do the CVS. If I missed this next appointment, I would have to wait for the amnio -- something I'd been trying to avoid from the beginning.
My CVS was scheduled for a Tuesday morning, Dec. 7, six days after my blood was drawn. On Monday, Dec. 6, I called the lab to make sure the results were in. I told myself I was just being paranoid. But I wanted to call the lab to make sure.
Well, they hadn't even started processing my test. The reference lab was still waiting for the paperwork and the lab that drew my blood didn't realize the reference lab was missing the paperwork. And I only found this out after spending hours on the phone with both the reference lab and the lab that drew the blood sample. I left voice mails. A manager called me and apologized to me. She said someone had not been properly trained in the paperwork process and promised that would be fixed so this wouldn't happen to anyone else.
After many many tearful enraged phone calls that day I was assured that they would process my sample overnight and the results would be at the CVS facility when I got there in the morning.
Somehow, I didn't believe them.
When we got to the lab on Tuesday morning, the results were not there yet.
But it turns out the lab was not to blame this time.
How unlucky is this? The freaking POWER was out at my OB's office and so the phone system and the fax machine were not working. (My OB is off on Mondays, so she did not even know the updated version of what was going on with this whole fiasco)
We waited at the CVS facility for a couple hours that Tuesday morning, praying that the lab results would come through. We looked at pictures in many magazines. (I was too freaked out to be able to have any attention span to read.)
Finally they got the results.
The CVS was a go.
