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I was pregnant with my first child and my husband and I had been anxiously awaiting the ultrasound with the hopes of finding out the gender of our baby. Finally, the day had arrived, a happy Friday afternoon. As I lay on the table with my shirt pulled up to my chest and gel on my belly, my excitement caused my hands to sweat and my heart to pound. As the technician pressed the instrument firmly against my stomach, a fuzzy image on the computer screen began to appear. I felt a nervous fluttering in my chest as I blinked back tears and starred at the tiny features of the baby in my belly.
Our baby was not as excited about the ultrasound as we were. He tried to roll away from the device that allowed us to see him. Luckily for us, there was not much room to move. With a defiant kick, our new family member finally stayed still long enough to have measurements taken and to expose the answer to the question that we couldn’t wait to find out.
“It’s a boy,” we were told. As I dabbed at the tears that were forming in the corners of my eyes, I couldn’t stop smiling when I saw the pride and excitement on my husband’s face. We held hands and giggled like teenagers as the rest of the measurements were taken. We were also about to hear news that would have a bigger impact than finding out that we had a son. Shortly after learning that we were having a baby boy, we were told matter-of-factly, “Your baby has choroid plexus cysts in his brain.” My happiness turned to confusion and my joy to fear. “Did you say cysts? In his brain? What does that mean?”
“I can only give you the information. You will have to talk to your doctor,” we were told by the tech. Not satisfied with her answer, we continued to ask questions. Questions that would not be answered. As the time grew closer to 5:00, the probability of reaching my doctor on a Friday evening was drifting away. This time I could not hold back my tears and left the ultrasound in a daze. My husband and I could hardly wait to get home and research choroid plexus cysts. This would prove to be a big mistake.
So on the Friday night that we learned we were having our first son, I spent the night crying at the computer as I read about chromosome abnormalities. Something that I should not have been worrying about. Nothing else on his ultrasound was out of the ordinary but I had never even heard of choroid plexus cysts. This was nearly eight years ago.
At the time, we did not find stories from parents that had discovered choroid plexus cysts (CPC) in an ultrasound and had healthy babies. It is probably not that it wasn’t happening but no one was writing about it. We didn’t know that finding an isolated CPC was usually nothing to worry about. It wasn’t until being reassured by my doctor, having another late term ultrasound (which showed that the CPC were gone), and giving birth to our healthy baby boy that I could finally relax. No abnormalities. No complications. He was perfect.
I have written another article about my experience that describes more facts about choroid plexus cysts. https://www.empowher.com/pregnancy/content/choroid-plexus-cysts-and-my-scary-ultrasound
I have been contacted by many women who had experienced this same thing. In fact, some women were not even told by the technicians about the CPCs and were unaware of them until they read it on their ultrasound pictures. This is more common than is talked about and the more parents who know about the possibility of detecting an isolated case of choroid plexus cysts and the probability that they will be gone by the third trimester, the less people that will go through the heartache that my husband and I did.
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