Antibody Jargon!

Of course after Jaton, Matt and I knew that we definitely wanted more children. It seemed like as soon as Jaton turned one, I had baby fever again. In November, we found out we would be expecting Huber baby #2 on July 26, 2012. Remember Jaton's birthday is July 27, 2010:) It was seriously deja vu all over again with ALMOST every aspect of the pregnancy. The timing was exactly the same on almost everything. We felt like we were living the same life as two years before. Until we got the call that my bloodwork came back...

Of course my first instinct was to rush to the internet to see what antibodies were, etc. Bad move on my part. It sent me straight to freak out mode with rhogam, miscarriage percentage, and statistics that just made me crazy. It took forever, almost two weeks, to find out that it was NOT the RH factor, but the Kell Antibody. Nobody had ever heard of it. We now know why! It is very rare. It comes from blood transfusions or one of the parents must be Kell positive. It never affects the first child, the mother can do nothing about it- no shots, etc. The next step of course was to find out where it came from---Matt is the lucky winner of being one of approximately 9% in the whole world who is Kell +. Baby number two had a 50/50 shot of being Kell+, which we now know he is. Like Matt said yesterday, "We can't win the lottery, but we sure can get the 4.5% chance to have a Kell baby." That is luck!

THE BASICS of KELL- (Matt and I are Kell professionals!)
-Comes from blood transfusions or one parent
-If mom is Kell- and baby is Kell+, mother will fight off baby because he looks like a foreign substance to her body
-Baby has the chance of becoming severely anemic and needing in uterine transfusions (IUT) or being delivered early so he can have exchange transfusions.
-Kell is extremely aggressive. Numbers can change within a day. Every week for us is a roller coaster.
-Kell babies can be perfectly healthy once they are out and have the initial transfusions.
-When Jaton was born via c-section, some of Matt's blood transferred over the placenta to make me "sensitized" to Kell
-Each baby has an even higher risk of being "more" Kell and becoming more anemic because each time the mother has a baby, she gets more sensitized