What's a Tri Screen

The tri-screen is a blood test. Took about 10 minutes. (Love those quick appointments.) From different hormones, etc in your blood, the doctors are able to tell if the baby will have a tendency toward down syndrome, spina bifida, and one other thing (hence, the "tri" part of the name). So, to boil it down, it checks for birth defects. If the blood levels are too high, then they send you for some fancy ultrasound (which I've been having already due to the fact that I'm deemed high risk) where they can look for certain things. One thing they check is the length of the bones in the arms and thighs. Apparenlty, down syndrome babies have shorter bones, so if the length comes up OK, then they can maybe determine that the blood test produced a false positive. My last ultrasound, I asked them if they could already see whether or not my babies were having these tendencies, but she said it was too early. So, if the tri-screen comes up positive, this next ultrasound will do more than confirm the sexes of the twins...it could give me hints as to whether they're healthy.