We met our midwife today, well we didn’t actually as she was off, but we did meet her stand in from another practice and a charming trainee. I felt the meeting went very well on the whole. Much of the time was taken up with general chit chat, taking histories, bloods etc. and giving us an outline of the process from here on in. We have chosen to go with the hospital in Livingston, St. John’s, which is a bit quicker for us to get to from here than the alternative which is the Simpson wing at the new Royal Infirmary. I have it from others who’ve been through the system that the care ratio at St. Johns is better too, so hopefully we’ll be pleased.
My disappointment with the whole thing today was that we didn’t get the input and discussion we’d hoped for regarding our diagnostic options. Being clued up and extensively educated, we’ve got some queries around exactly what sort of blood test our primary healthcare trust carries out at 16 weeks. Also, we hoped to gain some understanding of how much diagnostic certainty about genetic problems we can get from that, coupled with the 20 week detailed anomaly scan. Sadly getting closer to an answer on either of these topics appears to be beyond the scope of the meeting we had.
I’m now quite resolved to not having been able to have a discussion about diagnostic prediction, statistics and the relative weighting of false positives and false negatives. What I’m not really happy about is the complete lack of information as to whether it is the double, triple or quadruple analyte test that is used. All we got in return was that the test takes in to account age, weight and height; not really blood analyte parameters!!!