The Journey Begins

My wife and I were looking forward to our second pregnancy. We had timed this one so that our first child would not quite be 2 yet when his younger sibling was born. It was pretty simple for my wife to get pregnant and we eagerly anticipated the next 40 weeks and the eventual meeting of our next child. In early December we both went to my wife's 8 week exam and were so excited to be this far along in the pregnancy. Time was flying and we were quickly getting to the end of this year and moving towards 2006. The exam went relatively well aside from the doctor instilling the first hint of fear and apprehension in us for something totally unrelated to what we would find out was a major complication... he thought that the uterus was too small when he felt it with his hands. Whatever! During the exam the doctor drew blood to run some standard tests. A couple of days later my wife got a call from the doctor himself(always a sobering call) with the results of her blood test. Bad news. She was told that her blood contained an anti-body called anti-kell. Basically this meant that somehow my wife was exposed to blood at some point that had this kell protein and, her blood, detecting this as a foreign invader(much like a cold virus) created anti-bodies to the kell protein. When this happens there is risk to the developing baby that his blood will contain the kell protein and his blood would be attacked by my wife's blood and destroyed. With the babies red blood cells being destroyed he could become anemic and this would not be good. The big question now was... is this baby going to have a problem or is everything ok. If this baby was kell negative(as my wife is) than we were in the clear, but, if this baby were kell positive than his red blood cells would be destroyed by the anti-bodies. Red blood cells have many different proteins on their surfaces some are more common than others. With the kell protein only about 8% of caucasian males have it and the other 92% do not. The main factor here was my genetic make up and whether or not I had the gene for kell. If I did then was I homozygous(carrying two genes) or heterozygous(carrying one gene). If I carried one gene there would be a 50/50 chance that the baby inherited this gene. If I carried two genes then it would be 100% that the baby inherited the gene. The doctor ordered a blood test to be done on me that would determine if I was kell positive or not. When the results came back our hearts sank, I was kell positive(heterozygous, I carried one gene) and now we knew that this pregnancy would be difficult if the baby was also kell positive. We would not know for a while what the results were so we had some time to ponder this and learn all that we could in order to prepare for the next 7 months.