Antibodies but positive blood group?

[EllieJai44]

Anyone had a similar situation or know anything about this- at my booking in bloods they test blood type and antibodies, I'm O positive and no antibodies at that time, Tuesday I had my 28 week bloods and they found antibodies in there so need to have a repeat test to make sure!
But I'm confused, does this happen? Especially if both parents are positive blood group?

This is 3rd baby, 6th pregnancy, no issues with this in previous pregnancies and never had a blood transfusion!

DH and I have exactly the same blood group, but he is positive for Kell markers.

It wasn’t a problem in my first pregnancy, but either during giving birth or when I fell down stairs with DC2 I got exposed to kell positive blood and made antibodies.

DC2 had foetal anaemia. We were under foetal medicine at LGI and I had what felt like a million scans to measure her anaemia rates (it was 18 extra ones in the end).

before 34 weeks if she got too sick she would have had a blood transfusion of kell negative blood through the umbilical cord. As it was she toughed it out until 35+1 and had a transfusion after she was born. We had a two week stay in hospital to get her jaundice levels under control.

for you, either your previous babies (except from the last) have been negative or you’ve had no exposure to their positive blood. Or the baby you’re carrying is the only one who is positive and you’ve had a knock and been exposed to their blood. Once it’s happened, it can re-occur in every subsequent pregnancy.

for Kell, the marker in my DH’s blood, there’s two ‘strands’ of it. If you have both it’s 100% baby will be positive, if only 1 it’s 50/50. HD is heterozygous (1 strand), so it’s 50/50 for any future sprogs. Or it would be, if he hadn’t had a vasectomy because we were traumatised by the whole thing and said no more.

Good luck x

@Marmite27 thank you for your reply! I'm gonna have to have a look into Kell markers! Never heard of it!

Was your second baby born early because of it? I get knocked all the time with having two toddlers climb on me constantly and I did about a week or so ago shut the fridge door straight into bump 🤦‍♀️

I hope you're little one is all okay now? X

My little one is absolutely fine, she hit her milestones bang on target. So being early hasn’t deterred her in any way. She starts school in September, so she’s not so little anymore!

I couldn’t find out much about Kell at the time, but there are hundreds of different markers in blood types, we normal people don’t hear much about them other than the +/- and the rhésus disease that results from that. Your antibodies may not be Kell, so just be aware of that. They were named after a lady named Mary Kell if memory serves, she was the first person found to have them.

What we all need is a James Harrison (the man with the golden arm) he cured rhésus disease and has saved millions of babies including his own daughter as the anti-d injection you get is derived from his blood.

@Marmite27 thank you again for your replies! It will be beginning of next week before I know anything more, having a read up online it seems like it could be similar to your situation and this baby is the affected one, could be from a knock in this pregnancy, could be from birth of last baby which was a c section after a fairly traumatic induction and he was severely jaundice afterwards- or it could be from an infection, which I did have COVID at 15 weeks pregnant this pregnancy 🤷‍♀️

It's all so confusing! Haha

Anyone else had any experiences?