It is scheduled

I will be undergoing the aforementioned transabdominal cerclage (TAC) procedure on Friday at 1:30pm. It actually wasn't that hard of a call to make after I decided that I just cannot ignore all the good outcomes that my doctor has had with dozens of triplet/quad pregnancies. Plus, I figure that if I didn't go through with it and the babies came too early to have a chance at a normal life (or even at life, period), I would always wonder whether things would have turned out differently if I'd had the TAC.

Something else that made my decision a little easier was the opportunity I had to talk with a wonderful triplet mom named Linda (thanks for the contact, Christine!). She had the procedure done a few years ago with the same doctor and was able to answer a lot of my questions (most of which seemed too trivial to ask the doctor himself). I am all about studying up and having all the information beforehand, so my chat with Linda really set my mind at ease. And hearing about her once-tiny babies and how well they're doing three years on was really encouraging. I hope that a couple of years from now I can share my successful quad pregnancy story with a newbie!

In other news, I had my 12-week appointment with the doctor this morning. I got a full first-trimester screening, which means I got to look at my babies for a whole half-hour! For those keeping track, they now range from 5.5 to 6 centimeters in length (crown to rump). The ultrasound tech was excited when she stumbled upon the view below, which shows all four of them in one shot. She says not to expect it to ever happen again:



Part of the screening involved measuring the skin folds on the back of the babies' necks. To do this, the tech had to get a profile shot of each baby. To my delight, while she was measuring the distance between the neck muscles and skin, I got to get a good look at the faces of each of my babies. I think that Baby A looks just like Ted:


And Baby B looks like my brother did when he was little:



Babies C and D were harder to pin down, looks-wise, but it will be interesting to see if my first impressions of the other two babies turn out to be accurate. It's so exciting to see them looking more and more like little individuals!

My next ultrasound will be right before they wheel me into surgery, and then I'll have another one a few minutes after the procedure to reassure me that they all made it through okay. I will probably be too out of it to post, but Ted assures me that he will take advantage of his contributor status in order to let everyone know how things went. If all goes as planned, I'll be back in posting form by early next week!