First & Second Visits

Okay, I promise this blog isn't going to be only about the pregnancy, but, frankly, I feel like crap and have no energy so for the time being, I'm just hitting the highlights that may prove relevant to the overall story...and maybe in a few weeks I'll be back to raving about Becca and her ridiculous adventures.  Right now most of my conversations with her go like this:

Becca:  Mommy, you want to pway wif me?
Me:  Baby, I'd love to play with you, but I don't feel good right now. I need to lay down.  Do you want to see if Daddy can play with you?
Becca:  Aw, Mommy.  Are you sick?
Me:  Kind of.
Becca:  I'm sorry, Mommy.  I give you a kiss.  Dat will feel you better.  (Kisses me super-sweetly)  Do you feel better now?
Me:  Of course I feel a little better now.  I love your kisses!  But I still need to lay down.
Becca:  Mommy, you want to pway wif me now?

She is soooo sweet and compassionate...and persistant. 

So there's your Becca fix.  On to the doctor...

I saw Dr. Sizemore last Wednesday, when I was 6 weeks, 3 days (or so) pregnant.  His nurse, Liz, is awesome - she knows our whole story and has really been pulling for us.  She asked me if I wanted him to come in and talk to us first or just go straight to the ultrasound.  Of course I wanted the ultrasound immediately - I HAD to see that heartbeat!  She said, "Oh good; I didn't think I was going to be able to wait!"  So sweet.  So - we did the ultrasound, saw the teeny tiny heart beating, everything in the right place, etc.  Looks great.  And there's only one, which is good for my risks (and probably my sanity as well).  They didn't give us an official due date, as he wants to wait until 8 weeks and actually measure the baby and set it from there, but he saw everything he expected to see at 6 and a half weeks.

We talked over my treatment plan and changed a few things.  By this point, I was feeling really nauseas (WHY is my spellcheck not working?!), so we decided to nix the Metformin, as the, um, intestinal distress it caused combined with the aching tummy was too much to handle.  I think that's the only medicine change we made.  We did decide to co-manage with the Maternal-Fetal group at Vandy, and he's setting up my first appointment with them.  I haven't heard back, so I don't know when it will be, but he thought they'd like to see me fairly soon.  They gave me the supplies to do a 24-hour urine collection (hooray!) so that we have baseline numbers for protein in my urine.  I've been putting it off...but if you at church in the next few days, be careful when opening refrigerators.  :)  They took 10 vials of blood in order to get baseline numbers for a million other things, and that was in addition to the blood panel that my PCP had just run the week before.  Good thing my blood supply is increasing so much!  We are, of course, hoping to go full-term and pop out a big ole baby, but the good doc and I (and poooosssibly my overly-optimistic husband) agreed that a good, realistic goal will be to have a take-home baby, one born around 34-35 weeks who gets to go home from the hospital when I do.  It may be earlier; it may be later, but it's probably wisest for us to shoot for this age and be somewhat prepared (at work, etc) to see this babe a few weeks early, at least.  Dr. Sizemore is, as I've said before, AWESOME and wants to see me back in 2 weeks for another ultrasound and the official setting of the due date (da dada dA!)...but he said he'd be happy to give me another ultrasound this week if I needed to see that everything was okay again.  You'd think he knows me or something.

But...we actually ended up with another ultrasound just 2 days later.  I have been spotting some for the past couple of weeks, but I know that can be normal, and I had some similar spotting with Becca.  But on Friday morning, I woke up with more significant bleeding, so we went in to take another peek.  Everything still looked fine, and in the absence of any anomaly in the ultrasound and/or significant cramping, the doctor (this time Dr. Sizemore's partner, Dr. Didier, whom we also really liked) chalked it up to the blood-thinning effects of the baby aspirin and the Lovenox.  He figures that any bleeding I do have is going to appear more significant because, well, there's going to be more of it because the meds are doing their job...which hopefully means that the placenta will form without clots.  I talked to him about my nausea (which had gotten so bad tht I stayed home from work on Thursday), and he gave me a prescription for Zofran, which has heped some.  So, all is well.

And all is well...but I'm having trouble remembering that.  I'm feeling pretty awful now (with a pretty bad cold on top of tummy troubles), and I think the nausea is reminding me so much of Becca's pregnancy and everything that went wrong with it.  My anxiety has been really high lately, so I'm not planning on dropping my Zoloft dose anytime soon.  Sorry, baby...Mommy's got to take care of herself, too.  But my new mantra is, "Nothing's wrong until something is wrong...and nothing is wrong [yet]."  I don't have much patience for people who tell me that everything is going to be fine because, well, they have no idea a) what we've been through, even you know the story; and b) that everything IS going to be fine.  They just really want it to be fine, and that's sweet and all, but hold the bullshit.  You don't know that, so don't try to convince me of it.  Still...nothing is wrong until something is wrong.  And there are a million things that could go wrong.  But nothing is wrong now.