Meeting with Dr. Greg Ryan

Dr. Martel had asked us to go to the seventh floor of Mt. Sinai hospital to see Dr. Greg Ryan. When we got there, we were told that we needed to go down the street to the Ontario Power building as Mt. Sinai Hospital has the whole third floor for obstetrics, Special Pregnancy Program, etc. We did just that and after waiting for between 30 minutes to 1 hour we were asked to go in for an ultrasound prior to meeting with Dr. Ryan. It just so happened that one of Saskatoon's 3rd or 4th year medical students from the U. of S., Grace Park was doing part of her "practicum" at Mt. Sinai and was to sit in on and assist in Jessi's appointment, she took Jess's history.

The ultrasound was performed by Dr. Aseel Hamoudi, and she did a fine job - although, Jess did ask for a break after about two hours as it was quite a lengthy procedure. During the break, Grace did up the history and Dr. Ryan came in to see how it was all going. He then asked Aseel to continue with the ultrasound. She got some more info for him, then it was a waiting game as Dr. Ryan was phoning Mt. Sinai Hospital to see when he could book an operating room for the next morning (Thursday, March 30, 2006). Finally getting things somewhat organized, Dr. Ryan came back in to go over some of the ultrasound, do some more of his own testing, then asked Aseel to check Jess's cervix to make sure things "down there" were okay too. He left again, on another mission, so again we waited.

We then moved into the "Counselling" room down the hall and after a bit he came in along with Grace and Dr. Hamoudi, gave us a step by step run down on what was happening and what the options were, Jess was in stage two of TTTS. If Jess does nothing, there was a 10% survival rate. Jess could have an amnio-reduction to drain fluid from the "recipient" Twin but that would have to be done continually and there would be about a 29%??? survival rate. If Jess went ahead with the laser surgery to have one of the vessles zapped to kill the connection between Twin A and Twin B, there would be an 80% survival rate for one of the Twins and a 50% survival rate for both of the Twins. Twin A's name on the ultrasound was Poly because that twin had a large amount of fluid (or "P") to swim in and Twin B's name on the ultrasound was Oli because there was next to no fluid for this twin to swim in (like that twin was wrapped in saran wrap).

http://www.twinhope.org/centers_ww.html