Seeing the Cleft for Ourselves and Fetal Echo

We’ve had a lot of appointments the past few weeks so it’s been pretty busy lately. I’m going to break up the appointments/consults into different blog posts - it’s a bit much for one post!

At our 25 week appt with the high-risk ob, they performed the monthly ultrasound plus fetal echocardiogram.  Although during the anatomy scan, they were able to look closely at the heart, this test provides an even more thorough look at the different chambers of the heart, blood flow, etc.

This is a shot of Baby's face. His head is turned to the side in this view.

During the ultrasound I asked the technician to point out our baby’s cleft to us.  Up until this point, we were only able to get profile shots and it is not easy for us to understand where the cleft is from that view.  

At the previous two appointments they had been fairly certain that baby will have a bilateral cleft lip.  Once the ultrasound tech, pointed it out to us, it was very clear to see that it indeed appears to be bilateral.  She even was able to get a view of the baby from the top of his head and could see through to the palate. There are two very obvious dark spaces where there are gaps, so we are expecting an impacted palate too. We also saw the baby on 3D, but their opinion was that it is easier at this point to diagnose the cleft from the 2D actually.

Then, two pediatric cardiologists came in to perform the fetal echocardiogram.  I suppose we are a little more on edge after having the diagnosis, so two doctors coming in was a bit of a red flag. As it turns out, I think one of them was learning from the other how to use this particular model of the ultrasound machine.

Baby stayed still for them to get all their images and his heart checked out wonderfully (as far as they could tell). They want to see him soon after birth. Not all problems can be detected through the fetal echo.  We should request that they check him before leaving the hospital.

Next time, I’ll provide an update about our latest consults with cleft teams in the area.