30WK2D - catching up

Wow do I have a lot of catching up to do... It's been ages since I last blogged. Things at work have gotten a little nuts. Had to let someone go, and another staff person just went out on military leave so I'm training her replacement, and we just got a new customer service assistant so I'm training her too, with almost no time to do anything for myself anymore. Between working until 7-8 every night, my hour long commute, being seven months pregnant, and Kaitlin being super sick this past week (trying desperately not to catch what she's got) I'm pretty much all used up most of the time.

That being said, I managed to do my taxes and pay my bills last week. And we've been able to make steady, if slow, progress on the nursery. Also, we've made it into the third trimester! HOME STRETCH, GUYS!! I can't believe it's coming up so fast.

But first things first. Belly picture updates! We have one for 28 weeks:

And one from this weekend at 30 weeks. CUCUMBERBABY <3

Up next, we have pics from the 3D ultrasound that we had done yesterday. Baby spent a lot of time smashing face into the placenta and/or a hand, but the tech did a great job of catching these shots anyway. Just look at this little face!

We had these done at Belly Up Spa in south Denver, the same place we went back in September-ish to do the gender scan at 14 week. The place is super cute and the ladies there are all so nice! I splurged on a little "heartbeat animal" - they recorded baby's heartbeat into a little glowy heartshaped thing and then stuffed it inside a plush giraffe. <3 It makes for good cuddling!

I haven't been able to stop staring at these pics. I've been feeling baby kicking and grooving around for months now, but somehow, getting to see baby's face makes it so much more REAL. In ten weeks, this little person is going to leave my body and join our family. Just... Amazing.

In terms of pregnancy symptoms, being tired still tops the list. I also threw up yesterday morning - for only the second time in this entire pregnancy, so I don't really get to complain - though the nausea is mostly kept in check so long as I take my Diclegis. I am having an increasingly hard time fitting baby, food, oxygen, pee and gas in my body at the same time. So right after I eat I usually have a hard time breathing for a while. Congestion is chronic, but held at bay mostly by Afrin. Taking a ton of Vitamin C to try and keep from getting Kaitlin's bug :/ oh, and occasionally I pee a little, by accident, when I sneeze. Or cough, or laugh. Don't much care for that at all! Only other symptom is that the soles of my feet get tired and swollen a lot faster than they used to, so I basically want to wear sneakers all the time.

In the meantime, we're working hard on the nursery - which will really need its own separate post. So leaving things here for tonight, hopefully this week I'll get the chance to update again with some of the nursery in-progress pics and other goodies <3. In the meantime, headed to bed...going to be another long, long workday tomorrow...

12WK6D - First Trimester Down, Two To Go

Well, this post's title is a wee bit premature, since technically the second trimester doesn't start until tomorrow when we hit 13 weeks. However, since today is the last day of the first trimester, it's a big milestone day for us - the day when we share the news with friends and family. <3

Sickness has been a little worse the last few days. The Diclegis still gets me through the first few hours of the morning, but I'm lucky if I make it til noon without starting to feel crummy, and last night it got really bad the hour or so before I went to bed. Today it started in at about 10 AM, which means tonight's probably not going to be much fun either. :/ Ah well. At least tonight is our VERY LAST HEPARIN SHOT. Not looking forward to it, but very much looking forward to not having to do it anymore from tonight on! Same thing for the meds - I'm finally down to one estrogen and one 100mg progesterone pill a day, and tonight is the last dose. Starting tomorrow it's just prenatals (and diclegis), and I'm pretty happy about that. It feels a little like we've at last graduated from delicate-medically-assisted-pregnancy to a self-sustaining, "normal" one.

In the meantime, Kaitlin scanned in our ultrasound from last week. Here's our little 12-week-gestation munchkin:

You can see the skull and jaw to the left, and the shadows of wiggly hands above the belly and one wiggly leg and foot. Also the little spine. Still waiting on the Harmony test results, kind of hoping they will come in today or tomorrow. I think if I haven't got the call by tomorrow I'll call them to check.

In the meantime, still a lot of things on my plate that need to be done, both at work and at home, but I'm feeling low-energy and seasick today. What I really want to do is go home for a half a day and sleep some more. :P Guess we'll see how the day plays out... the month of October's going to be crazy busy (performance eval time at work, and OMGSEWING every weekend) so I really hope the morning sickness finishes up shortly.

Welcome to October, little baby. Next year I promise you the coolest Halloween costume on the block. >D It will probably match the dog's.

11WK6D - Ultrasound appointment

So tomorrow we will hit twelve weeks (yay, I really can't WAIT for this first trimester to be over) and we went in this morning for an ultrasound. Here's a super flattering picture of me watching baby dance all over the screen:

The bruises on my tummy are fading some, as we're only doing the shots every other night now - only one more week to go, and then NO MORE INJECTIONS!!!! So very excited for THAT. :P

Anyway, baby is doing great. Measuring 12WK3D - about 5.9cm - little overachiever! And he/she has two legs and two arms and an a-okay nuchal thickness (no Down's indicators that the tech could see.) Oh, and we saw at least one hand with a perfect little thumb and four fingers. Baby was wiggling and squirming so much that the ultrasound tech had a bit of a time trying to get good measurements, but we got a bunch of pics to take home that I'll post probably tomorrow, and a couple of videos of the wiggling. Behold:

They also drew blood for a cystic fibrosis and Harmony test. Apparently if we get both tests, insurance is more likely to cover them at no charge (??) So we opted for both, and I thanked the doctor for the anti-morning-sickness meds. In spite of how uncomfortable I've been the past few weeks, life with the meds is still decidedly better than without them. 

Sadly, it's looking like we are going to have to change doctors. :( My work's open enrollment for health  benefits is coming up next month, and I have to switch to a different network (one that's free for me, a spouse, AND a child) because my current network will be way too expensive to cover both Kaitlin and the baby. The new network, though, is completely exclusive - I cannot go to ANY doctor who is not in-network - and my OB-GYN is not in the network. So now I guess I have to find a new provider, and our next appointment will likely be with whoever that is, at 16 weeks. Sigh. 

I'm going to wait until after we get our Harmony test results back from this doctor, and I have to make sure to ask her to mail the results to me so that I can give them to the new doc... and then I'll have to start the process of calling around for a new OB. She said we should get the results in about a week, though, so I'm pretty excited about that... in a week, we'll know whether baby is a boy or girl (even if I'm not allowed to tell anybody).

Anyway, really happy to see that baby is doing well and scooting around happily in there... makes all the misery and exhaustion of the past few weeks worth it. One more week to go, and we'll be in the clear to tell friends & family about the coming addition to our little family!

Things are going to really start getting nutty in the next couple of months, with elopement preparations and baby preparations kicking into gear. Really hoping the morning sickness will go away soon so that I've got the energy to tackle it all :)

NINE WEEKS

So nine weeks today, and I have the goodies from yesterday's ultrasound to share. <3 Here's our little gummi bear baby...

Dark banana shape is the gestational sac, baby's head is to the left, body to the right... can you see the little leg buds? So cute!

And here are a couple videos, one has the sound of the heartbeat and the other one we tried to capture how much baby was wiggling around. There was a LOT of wiggling, hee~*

As for symptoms, the nausea started in early today. It hasn't been awful, but still not fun. Is it strange, to feel a little comforted by feeling sick?  My brain now associates feeling sick with reassurance that baby must be doing okay. At least my energy levels have been good so far this morning, even with the ucky tummy, and I'm trying really hard to drink more water (which might be part of the reason I started feeling sick sooner.)

Another med reduction tomorrow. Week by week we're slowly weaning off all these pills, yay! I told Kaitlin last night that we should try the whole pendulum-swinging-over-the-belly-to-predict-gender thing tonight, LOL. I also kind of want to try that at-home Intelligender urine test, even though the reviews pretty much all say that it's just for fun and has a 50% chance of being right (imagine that, ha!) We're going to get to find out early anyway, but since this is going to be our only baby I kind of want to do it ALL, all the fun things that it's possible to do during a pregnancy, so that we don't miss out on anything.

But Kaitlin says I'm not allowed to even post the results of those tests on the blog. No test results at all, no matter how silly or just-for-fun, until the gender-reveal party. SIGH. She's already plotting how she wants to do a baby-announcement graphic for facebook, though. She's so cute, LOL...

So this weekend she's spending Saturday at an SCA event, and we have to get through some chores and things on Sunday and Monday. I also have to get a big chunk of sewing done on the SCA project. I'm opting out of the event this weekend because I'm still supposed to be resting, all through the first trimester. And honestly, hanging out in the hot sun feeling sick and queasy for an entire weekend, not to mention trying to lace myself into garb styles that are pretty much all tight and not comfy (I have yet to make myself a Viking ensemble) just doesn't sound like fun at all. So going to stay home and work on the project instead, and probably spend the sickest hours of the day hanging on the couch with my dog and some K-drama. :)

Just have to get through this Friday at work first... luckily the day's half over already! Last but not least, here's what BabyCenter says baby looks like today:

7WK4D - Ultrasound goodies

So I was finally able to get the video off my phone and Kaitlin scanned in the ultrasound printouts for me, and here they are!

So again the dark teardrop-shaped thing is the gestational sac, and the round bright white outline is the yolk sac. But look how much bigger baby is! Floating above the yolk now. The rounder area on the left is the head, and the pointier area to the right is the tail. See the little brighter white spot near the tail? That's a leg that's starting to form. And the whole middle segment, on the screen, is what was pulsing - it's where the heartbeat is. We were able to see little nubs around that area too, that will turn into arms and hands.

And here, friends, is the most fantastic souvenir of our ultrasound visit. Behold the darlingness of this tiny little heartbeat:

All the love. Love love love.

Nausea was maybe the worst yesterday that it's been so far. I had a really hard time at work, trying to focus when I felt so awful. Today's been better... only just starting to get some of the nausea now. Hoping it staves off until after work hours because I have so much to do and really need to be able to bring my A-game...

6WK4D - Relief

Kaitlin scanned the picture of our little embryo ultrasound for me last night, so I can finally post it. The pic shows the whole gestational sac (the teardrop shaped dark space) with the yolk sac (the round white outline) and the fetal pole (the sort of vertical white mass on the left of the yolk sac). Right now it's so early that the yolk sac is sustaining the baby... in fact, my pregnancy book entry for yesterday informed us that the baby's future sperm or eggs will actually be formed in the yolk sac and pass to the baby's body a little later - so weird! Anyway, eventually the yolk sac and gestational sac end up turning into the placenta as the little shrimp grows bigger.

Here's what BabyCenter says a six-week embryo looks like. See what I mean about being a little shrimp?

Maybe it’s just the high after getting to see that tiny heartbeat yesterday, but I kind of feel like all that anxiety and worry I was dealing with has melted away. I feel calm and certain that things are going to be okay. I know there’s still risk and that it’s still very early, but somehow I just feel a million times better.

Yetserday was the first day of truly serious nausea. I’d say on a scale of 1-10, about a 5… but it was persistent and would NOT go away for pretty much the entire day. I finished my entire stash of Saltines at work, and had a huge craving for red meat by the time I got home (I usually don’t like red meat very much) so we went out for a celebratory dinner and I had steak.  Thankfully the nausea wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t keep food down (it has to be really, really bad, because my stomach is stubborn about holding on to its contents) but the driving and walking and such really were not fun. Also, the smell of my dog’s litter box and the cats’ litter boxes was driving me nuts last night.

This morning, I bought a decaf coffee and a chocolate muffin at the little cafeteria at work… but the muffin tastes fishy. Like, literally, it tastes like fish. I’m hungry so I’m trying to eat small bits at least, but I don’t think I’m going to get through much of it because chocolate fish tasting muffin is so not delicious. I have no idea if this is because of the pregnancy, or because the café downstairs isn’t the classiest of joints.  SIGH. I’ll need to spend my lunch break at the store getting more work groceries. So far it appears that what my body wants is red meat and greens. Lots and lots of greens. I actually sat on the couch the other night just stuffing salad leaves straight from the bag into my face. O.o At least it’s healthy, I guess??

Let’s see, what else… my lower back was aching last night after we took a shower. Still having some blood pressure issues, but they weren’t as bad yesterday because the weather was cooler.  Boobs still sore, still getting up in the middle of the night to pee.  Super tired today, but that’s mostly because I didn’t sleep well last night (Kaitlin kept tossing and turning, which kept me from being able to sleep, which is probably also the reason why I feel irritable this morning…)

My name’s been changed at work, and in our state systems now, so there’s really only a few things left to update – bank accounts, the house title, my passport, and various other bits. I’ll need to order more work business cards and have them redo the sign outside my office. But otherwise I am well on the way to starting a whole different kind of life. Kaitlin and I are starting to talk about our Vegas elopement, too, which looks like it will probably be November-ish.

It’s shaping up to be a very busy next few months, with an SCA project I’ve been asked to complete by mid-November and Kaitlin switching to a new teaching position and a ton of other projects, big and small, that are going to need attention. But it’s exciting, too, because now that our little one is really and truly in existence and on the way, life is going to start snowballing forward over the next few months. So excited!

Kaitlin shared this hilarious little video with me on Facebook yesterday and I thought other pregnant cat-lovers out there would appreciate it:

6WK3D - Ultrasound Day

I started spotting again on Saturday night, through most of Sunday. It's now about 5AM and I am lying in bed waiting for my alarm to go off, because our ultrasound is at 8 this morning. I didn't sleep very well... Too nervous. Excited, anxious, fearful... I just keep thinking over and over "please be in there, at least one strong heartbeat, please don't turn into a mess like last time, please let this be it."

My stomach aches, not sure if it's anxiety or hunger or nausea. It's been a very long couple of weeks and this is our first really meaningful glimpse into what's happening. Naturally my mind keeps running over all the things that have brought us to this point, the failed relationships, the crazy awful year at work, the doctor appointments and needles and pills and probes and plane tickets and blood and speculums and money stuff, like some kind of never-ending 80's movie musical montage. Are we about to get one more step closer to a happy ending? Or are we about to face yet another devastating plot twist?

At least we're only hours away now, instead of weeks or days. If today is good news, there's still weeks to go in which anything could still happen. But we can cross that bridge if and when we get the chance to get to it. Today first.

Not sure how I'm going to make it through the day at work after this. Hope the alarm goes off soon....


EDIT:

WE SAW A HEARTBEAT!!!!

After the longest morning EVER, getting up and getting dressed for work and making coffee and getting my little dog out of her cage and driving over to the doctor's office and waiting nervously for the ultrasound tech, we finally got just exactly precisely the results we were hoping for.

One gestational sac. One yolk sac. One fetal pole, measuring 6.33 mm (6 weeks and 3 days). And one itty bitty fluttering heartbeat at 108 bpm.

WE HAZ A BABY.  Oh my gosh oh my gosh. The ultrasound tech printed pics for us, and I took pics of them with my phone, but of course my phone is not cooperating so I won't get to post them probably until tonight when I get home. In the meantime, though, this is a short clip that Kaitlin took on her phone, trying to capture the heartbeat on video.

There really just aren't words to describe the relief, the joy, the gratitude. I know we're not out of the woods yet - there's a good 6 weeks or so more to go in this trimester where anything can still happen... but at least for today I am so very, very happy and thankful. Thankful for a heartbeat, even more thankful that there's exactly one baby in there, which was exactly what we wanted. No more pendulum stressing about what-if-it-didn't-really-work to oh-my-god-how-will-we-have-the-life-we-imagined-if-there's-multiples. We still have to be cautious about keeping the one we've got... but it couldn't be a more perfect little bean, right where it's supposed to be for this stage, and there really isn't anything more we could have asked for.

We get to go back in one week for another scan, to see how it's progressing. And then I think I'll make an 8WK3D appointment for a scan with my OBGYN... and that way I'll get one scan a week for three weeks in a row... LUCKY!! :)

Now to sit here and covertly admire my ultrasound pictures for the rest of the day at work... <3

5WK5D, Part Deux - Threatened Miscarriage

The bleeding and cramps got so bad tonight that I decided to go to the ER. Kaitlin had to drive me there, in the middle of a snowfall, with the roads so bad that her car got stuck in our cul-de-sac and we had to take mine instead.

We made it to the ER, where everybody was very nice, and we were there for about three hours. They put an IV in my elbow (ow, ow, OW) and asked a ton of questions and were pretty confused by the whole IVF-in-Greece thing. But they did a pelvic exam, and took urine and blood samples, and did an ultrasound. All the while I am bleeding, and cramping, and crying.

Bottom line is, they can't say for sure what's happening. They sent me home with a diagnosis of a "threatened miscarriage."



They did an HCG test, and the results came back at 7900ish. Given that I was at 425 on 12/26, and doing the math thereafter, that's actually in the right range... which is a bit of a comfort, at least.



And the ultrasound was tough... they kept saying everything was too small and it was too early to really see much. It does appear that there's only one sac in there. But, it looks like they did see the hint of a fetal pole, and both Kaitlin and the ultrasound tech were pretty sure they saw a heartbeat (though at this stage it could also have been my heartbeat, so no guarantees.)





So the bad news is, we could be miscarrying and won't know for a while, until the next few ultrasounds. I am still cramping and bleeding right now, and scared... really scared. Also I am not looking forward to the emergency room bill when it arrives and am a little worried how much it's going to cost. And my arm hurts from that stupid IV.

The good news is, my HcG levels are where they should be, and there's definitely a sac in there, with something in it, that may have a heartbeat. Looks like there's only one, which I am perfectly content with. So whatever this bleeding is, it hasn't flushed the baby out, at least not yet. Maybe there's still a chance that things will be okay.

It could be that there was a second embryo that didn't make it, and that's what this bleeding is all about. It could be that the heparin I'm on is making too much blood in my uterus and my uterus is just flushing it so there's room for the baby. Or it could still turn into miscarriage. This is literally a glass half full vs. half empty situation, because apparently 50% of the women who bleed like this miscarry, while 50% of them go on to have normal pregnancies.

Meanwhile the cramps are still coming, though less frequently now. The blood is still coming... though maybe a little less of it?? I can't quite tell. I'm staying in bed all day tomorrow and toying with the idea of staying home from work on Monday... though there is a really important interview I'm supposed to do on Monday and I would hate to miss it. I would hate miscarrying even more, though, so I'm going to do what my gut tells me to do once I see how the bleeding behaves tomorrow.

So far, pregnancy has been kind of fun, but also the most scary and stressful thing I've been through. That doesn't mean I don't want to stay pregnant, little bean, you hear me? Stay in there and hang on, okay? Please?