I’m Pregnant And I’ve Irradiated My Fetus!

The cardiologist has declared my heart perfect. We looked at it glug-glugging away on an echocardiogram, the little flaps in between my chambers flipping in time with my pulse and making me feel that the mechanism keeping me alive looked awfully flimsy in black-and-white 2-D. No sign of pericarditis, he said, so maybe the symptoms that had brought me to the ER Sunday were just really bad heartburn? That sounded good—anything that didn’t involve a malfunction of that vulnerable-looking piece of machinery glowing on the computer screen to our left.

It was off to the gastrointestinal doc, with a critical stop at the drugstore on the way. I was now 11 days past a potential conception event, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I ripped that white stick from its aluminum packaging and peed on it with abandon. I was expert at this process now. Pee on the stick, replace the cap, watch for the first control line to come up nice and pink, go into the living room, synchronize watch with the time on the VCR, turn on Discovery Health channel to watch exactly three minutes of Babies: Special Delivery before returning to the bathroom and certain disappointment.

Only this time there was a faint but undeniable pink line next to the control strip. I had been right all along! Those ER docs had doubted me, but there was a blob of cells dividing inside me, trying to become a person. What had I done? Exposed the cells to high-dose radiation totally unnecessarily all because of a case of bad heartburn. This was no time for celebration. This was the time for maniacal Internet research on radiation exposure and birth defects.

Before my husband even heard the news, I spilled the beans to Robert Brent, head of the Clinical and Environmental Teratology Laboratory (meaning he studies birth defects) at Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. I found Dr. Brent on the website of the Health Physics Society, where he authored an article about radiation exposure to developing embryos. A few of his answers were reassuring but none addressed my specific situation. So I tracked down his email address and fired off a detailed missive repeating the riveting story I have told my readers in this blog. Might he, I inquired, be willing to weigh in on this exact series of events and the likelihood of it producing a baby with three eyes and an elbow where the heart should be?

I was stunned to receive a long response before the end of the day. Good news, said the friendly and thorough Dr. Brent. First off, a chest X-ray and a chest CT scan do not directly expose an embryo to radiation. Second, the amount of radiation emitted from diagnostic tests like these, even if it had reached the embryo, is not great enough to increase the chance of birth defects beyond the normal chance (3%). Last, the exposure had occurred during the “all or none” period of embryonic development, when the blastocyst is a bunch of stem cells that will either be halted from developing in their entirety or, if only some are damaged, will forge ahead by passing off tasks handled by the damaged cells to the remaining healthy ones. As I was still pregnant, I had dodged the only possible bad outcome, the stopping of the cells in their tracks. In other words, my potential baby was already kicking ass.

See all posts by Kate Rope.
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