Pregnancy and Ariana's CCAM

The Jolly Weirdness of Pregnancy

For sure, being pregnant is not a walk in the park; it’s more of a waddle. I threw up a few times, was nauseous and uber tired, had a superhuman sense of smell, and sometimes had swollen squishy feet just like most women do. My tummy distorted in ways that would’ve been soooo unnatural if I wasn’t pregnant, though seeing it move and feeling the baby move inside was da bomb. Not your average experiences at all, but pretty normal for a pregnancy. 

I did have a few uncommon moments:

Bleeding gums and sores. So yeah, pregnancy can screw up the gums, and I didn’t know that. I hadn’t seen a dentist in years because I don’t get cavities. Enter the second trimester of pregnancy and whammo! I couldn’t brush anywhere without making my gums bleed. Then I got sores in the tissue around my gums. We lived in south San Francisco at this time, and because I was pregnant the dentist there didn’t want to use anesthesia while they cleaned the plaque out of my inflamed bleeding gums. It was the most painful teeth cleaning ever. I could really sympathize with people who fear the dentist.

Contemplating my fate...

Sleeping on an air mattress in high humidity. We slept on a raised air mattress for four months in California, and it really tested my sanity. First of all, it’s an air mattress--it’s not nice to anyone, especially pregnant ladies. I woke up constantly with aching joints and feeling like an old woman. (Even though I’ve never been an old woman…) Second of all, I grew up in Utah’s desert dryness, and we were living in one of the most humid places in the Bay area during the most humid time of the year. It was like crawling into a clammy sleeping bag on top of a lopsided rock with a warm basketball attached to my stomach. Then ten minutes later, my body heat turned the bag into a sweaty sauna. Returning to our real bed in the dry Utah air was one of the happiest days ever. I probably kissed the bed that day.

The CCAM: The Cyst in Ariana’s Lung

Early in my pregnancy, in Utah, the OBGYN told me that in a certain number of weeks it’d be time for the 20-week ultrasound. I got all excited. “We’ll learn the gender!”

She smiled and said, “Well, yes, and they’ll check to see that everything is anatomically sound.” Haha, like that’d be a problem, I thought.

Oh silly me.

We learned we were having a girl. Then my joy fell to pieces when they said the ultrasound was showing a bright spot in her lung. They didn’t know what it was, but it needed to be monitored, so I had to come back in another two weeks.

The possibility that something was wrong with my unborn baby weighed on me all that day. In one brief discouraging moment I thought, “Every pregnant woman I know seems to have a perfectly healthy baby. Of course I’d be the odd one out.” I got over the self-pity, but never once did I think, “At least it’s not a miscarriage.” It wasn’t until later that I realized how common miscarriages are, and heard stories of how heartbreaking they can be.

I find that bad situations are usually worse when I’m clueless about them, so I took to the Internet and Googled “bright spot on lung” etc. etc. I mostly found anecdotes from other mothers saying the bright spot was a cyst. The stories offered a huge comfort because pretty much all of them had a happy ending: the cyst grew bigger for a few weeks, then stopped growing and disappeared either before or shortly after birth. Also that day, someone from the ultrasound place called to talk with me about what was potentially wrong and how they would keep an eye on it. She gave me the same assurance that the problem usually went away on its own.

Thus followed a great medical journey. They confirmed it was a Congenital Cystic Adenomatoid Malformation (CCAM) in the lower lobe of the right lung. The ultrasound doc told me, “CCAMs aren’t rare, but they aren’t common.” It actually made sense to me. Indeed, when I returned to Utah, most of the ultrasound people there had never seen one before.

The nerve-wracking moments came during appointments when I was laying on the bed and the nurses were reading out the baby's measurements. They’d come to a spot and linger, or sound unsure, or say the doctor would need to take a look at something. I’d just stare at the ceiling and think, “What? What?!” There were two problems they were watching for. If the cyst--which was tissue taking up space in the lung that would not function like lung tissue--grew large enough to put pressure on her little heart while it was developing, her heart would be in trouble. The other problem could be a sequestration in which a blood vessel connected to the cyst. I asked the doc, “What can be done if either of those things happen?”

He said, “Fetal surgery.” They would do surgery on the baby while she was still in my womb.

Freaky weird.

There was literally nothing we could do except wait and pray. In between appointments I tried not to think about what we couldn’t control. Along the way we were blessed with tender mercies, like our baby being healthy in every way possible except for the silly cyst. I learned to be grateful that we live in a time where such medical intervention like fetal surgery is even possible. The doc was a charismatic and caring guy who made things fun with his obsession with taking ultrasound pics of baby feet. 

Feet!!!

The cyst did grow for several weeks, then just like in all those anecdotes, it slowly began to shrink as she grew bigger. A cardiologist took some ultrasounds of our baby’s heart and blood flow and everything looked great. The cyst was still there a week or so before she was born, so to take precautions, she was born in the Operating Room. Then we learned that the thing we were hoping for had happened: the cyst was gone. Good news like that calls for leaping into my husband’s arms and hugging him to death, but having just pushed a baby out of me, well, that didn’t happen. Plus the doctor told me the news at like five or something in the morning when I was half asleep and drugged up on painkillers. But we were so grateful that our CCAM story had a happy ending.