Still stuck at home, and running out of things to do, I have decided to make another attempt at blogging. We'll see how long this lasts. There is of course only one thing I can write about and that is the first six months of my adventure into motherhood...
When one gets pregnant, one expects 9 months of uncomfortableness, weight gain, and a few other unexpected difficulties. One does not expect to loose 25lbs, become malnourished, 5 months of bed rest, and bimonthly sonograms for abnormal fetal development. But in some ways having a baby is like having sex: everytime you do it there is a chance you will make a baby. Everytime you get pregnant there is a chance that everything will go wrong. And I don't have the greatest record, not with the baby making thing (she was planned, last min, but planned all the same), but with things not going wrong.
The first trimester seemed like a living nightmare, only to be marred by the second trimester which was an actual living nightmare. I enter the third next week and not to jinx myself but things are actually looking up.
With in a few weeks of getting pregnant the sickness started. Who the hell named it "morning sickness"??? Even people who have normal sickness agree its not isolated to the morning. I, on the other hand, had all day, every day, on the hour violent vomitting. Within weeks my diet became restricted to bread and water, and too much of either of those would put me soundly with my head over the toilet for a half hour or so. I have since learned this condition is called hyperemesis gravidarum (hg) and happens to roughly 2% of women. My first OB did not tell me this, she insisted it was perfectly normal and if I ate crackers and drank ginger-ale it would go away. I want to point out that at 27 weeks I still can not drink carbonated beverages. She was all sorts of stupid and and made mistakes that would eventually cause me a great deal of difficulty, but I am getting ahead of myself. It wasn't till I ended up in the hospital dehydrated and vomiting blood that I learned about hg. They also did a sonogram (@ 7 weeks) and it was clear I was going to be giving birth to a fish.
Upon my exit from the hospital I went back to stupid OB who then decided that she would give me medication for the nausea...would have been nice 3 weeks earlier, but apparently she just didn't believe me or the 6lbs I had lost. Unfortunately the thing about pills is that you have to keep them down, to this day I can't take prenatal vitamins, though a later OB told me to take gummi vitamins for kids which is better than nothing. Not really rocket science but beyond the intellectual capability of the first OB. Do I sound a bit bitter about this women? No let me turn the volume up then.
By the end of my first trimester I had lost 20lbs, used up all my sick leave, had a gastro-intestinal tear from all the vomiting, completely unable to sleep becuase of vomiting around the clock, heart problems, passing out and collapsing from the lack of sleep and nutrition and low blood pressure, in an extraordinary amount of pain and generally very depressed about the whole situation. Eventually I went to see my general practitioner who irritates the crap out of me but who is an excellent doctor and has been seeing me for 10 years. He kind of flipped out and immediately put me on Medical Leave and wanted me hospitalized. I was to be put in bed and watched 24 hours a day. I was very lucky and my mother took time off from her job so I could stay at her house and she babysat me for a month, thinking that the sickness would wind down as my first trimester had ended. Well that didn't happen. I continued to loose another 5lbs and at 17 weeks we decided that a new OB was in order.
Several of my friend had used the Midwives at Esposito, Mayer and Hogan, just wanted to give them a shout out becuase they are awesome, so we made an appointment. Within 5 mins of meeting the midwife we felt thousand times better. Jeannie was so calming and comforting and immiedatly began to give us solutions that might actually work, like the gummi vitamins, and gingersnaps in liu of the blasted ginger-ale. She suggest beans and nuts for protein alternatives. She also instructed us to schedule an ultrasound at the Advanced Fetal Care Center at the University of Maryland, and not some general radiology center since for some reason I hadn't had one at 12 weeks (this is the mistake I mentioned earlier that would turn out to be devastating later on). She also told me that hg usually comes to a conclusion around 20 weeks, not 12 weeks like normal morning sickness. She said I would probably need an IV for fluids and anti-nausea meds but was willing to wait a few more weeks to see if it went away on its own. I oped to wait becuase a permanent IV would have restricted me even further then I was already.
So we scheduled the ultrasound and waited to see if the nausea stopped and sure enough at 20 weeks it slowed down and by 23 it was almost gone completely and I stopped loosing weight. Now onto our awesome friends at the Fetal Care Center. Going down there is a bit of a pain becuase it is in the heart of Baltimore and you have to contend with traffic and parking. I have also waited in the waiting room for upwards of an hour and half. All that being said the doctors are the best at what they do.
So here is how the 18-20 week anatomy ultrasound goes: you are taken back to the room with the fancy machines and in this case a flat screen monitor that allows you to see everything that happens in real time. A very nice sonogram tech begins to look at the baby and all her little baby parts. At first you have no idea what you are looking at and then you get a wide screen shot that shows you there is an actual baby in there and not just a fish. She shows you hands and feet and the heart and brain. Then she asks you if you want to know the sex and says see that, those are little princess parts and draws and arrow on the screen so you can't miss it. Poor baby has no privacy. At this point I was pretty excited. When I thought I would have two or three children I didn't care if this one was a boy or a girl, but when I got so sick that my health was in serious danger and it was looking like I could never have another, I really wanted a little girl. My husband commented that some where there had to be a rash of little boys being born becuase everyone we know had or was having girls...
So the tech finishes up and you're really excited. She looks so perfect and it all becomes very real and seems like all the trouble was worth it. Then she says "let me go check with the doctor, sometimes he'll come in and look for himself and sometimes he'll just let you go. I'll be right back." Pat, my husband, was beaming and says everything is going to be ok and lets text our closest friends that she is a girl and her name is Scarlett Victoria. We did. The I tell him don't get too excited yet the tech can't legally tell us if anything was wrong, but she seemed so perky that I was pretty sure it was fine. Then the doctor comes in...........
Worst day of my life. First off I want to say Dr. Baschat is amazing and we can never be grateful enough for his care and precision. So he starts to point out all the problems and the list was pretty long. I know many people who had slight downs scares, bright spots and calcium deposits, but the risks are still in the thousands. Scarlett had a swollen nuchal fold, it is supposed to be under 6, hers was 10-12. She had a swollen abdomen and parts of her head. She also didn't have enough amniotic fluid. It is supposed to be 10+, hers was under 4. That was a lot of information to put on the internet and I am not quite sure how my family will feel about it but this is therapeutic so I am doing it anyway.
So Dr. Baschat tells us there are a lot of possible problems. First the nuchal fold problem brings the risk for downs to about 1 in 300-400. Still a pretty big number, but since nothing else had gone right, that number was scary. The swelling in the brain and abdomen was indicative of another genetic problem that I can't remember the name of. Then he says it also possible that the baby has some kind of infection that is causing her to retain fluid and that could explain the swelling, the nuchal fold, and the low amniotic fluid. Inutero infections can go away on their own or they can kill the baby, they also can have a laundry list of long term effects that modern science has yet to fully understand.
He asks us to see two things the quad screen (second trimester genetic testing which is really only a statistical probability indicator) and the 12 week ultrasound. As you know we didn't have a 12 week ultrasound. If we had then they could have compared the two to see if any of these problems were consistent and would have given them a much better idea of what was going on. We did have the quad screen, it was the last thing we had done before leaving the stupid OB. We requested when we changed doctors to have our records transferred as well, which they wanted us to pay to have done and we did, 2 weeks prior. So the Fetal Care Center calls the new OB for the results and they say they have yet to get the records. Fantastic, here we are trying to find out if our baby is going to die and the stupid OB hadn't even sent the damn records.
So Dr. Baschat says we can wait till the records can be obtained but all they will really give us is more statistical data on whether or not having an amniocentesis is worth the risk. In case you don't know what an amnio is, its a big needle they sick into the uterus and remove genetic material to test. There is a 1 in 300 chance that the needle will break the amniotic sac and cause a miscarriage. So this is all a game of numbers. Without discussing it with Pat or even waiting for the test results I tell him I want the amnio and I want it now. I don't know why I did that. I just did, in that moment I just wasn't willing to take the risk that something was wrong. I needed to know (btw Pat completely supported my decision).
So they do the amnio and they tell me to hold completely still. Something I am universally known to not be able to do, according to my mother I couldn't even do it inutero. I prayed like I have never prayed before to just hold still, becuase if you jerk about then the doctor could puncture the sac. It was kind of a miracle. The nurse said I was the calmest, stillest, amnio they had ever done. I later told this to one of my pastors who said it truly moved him, becuase he knows how unstill and calm I am. Anyway then they ask me if I want to participate in some research they are doing at the University that could eliminate the the need for amnios all together. All they wanted was a tube of blood and they would test it to see if they could get the same gentic material they could from the amnio and we'd get $25 (which I still haven't seen, but anyway). Of course we would give them blood! Helping other women to not have to go through this dangerous procedure. Who the hell wouldn't? Apparently plenty of people becuase there is a phone number to call if you change your mind.
The doctor also needed my blood type becuase if I was an negitive blood type, which I am, then I would need a rhogam shot (look it up I am not getting into why you need that). They can't just take my word for it so they need some medical records...great here we go again. The stupid OB is still not releasing them. So I have to wait around in the doctors office crying rather than getting to go home and cry. Eventually I realize that my GP has that info so I tell them to call him. BTW rhogam shots really hurt. To top it all off they weighed me for the University study and I had lost another 3lbs....It was truly the worst day of my life, followed by a terrible two weeks.
The first 24 hours after an amnio are the worst. You lie down and wait to see if you have a miscarriage. I did not. Then with in 3 days the "genetic councilor" calls you with the preliminary results of the amnio which tells you 4 things the gender, down syndrome, spinia bifida, and one other big genetic disorder that I can't remember. Those 3 days were agnoy. I had spent the past 5 months depressed and generally unhappy about being pregnant. Then they showed me my little girl and I named her and all I wanted was for her to be ok. I couldn't bring myself to use her name, look at her pictures, or go into her nursery. My sister took off work and came to stay with me while I waited she promised me that as soon as they called and said that it was ok we were going to the mall to buy her some pink clothes. She cleared round one and I have never been so happy in my life. 5 days later they called with the rest of the genetic tests and she cleared that too, 3 more days and they called and said nothing came from the viral culture they did.
We returned to the Fetal Care Center two weeks after the first ultrasound in pretty good spirits considering that all her tests came back clear. Dr. Baschat was in surgery so we had to see this other lady doctor. I do not like her. She isn't very expressive and says hmmm that is interesting a lot and doesn't explain what she is looking at or whats making her say hmmm until the end. So then she calls in Baschat and they tell us that they think she had an infection but she appeared to be recovering. I say "but the viral culture came back negative" and they say yeah well just like in adults there are only so many viruses we can test for and we didn't test for bacterial infection so basically it didn't really tell us anything...Great. So now what. "You need to come back every 2 weeks for the rest of your pregnancy so we can monitor organ development and check that things are going ok." Great (those greats are sarcastic btw).
So where does that leave us? Well first of all I hadn't told anyone but close friend and immediate family. I kept waiting for a point where we felt like things were going to be ok and we just seemed to never get that. The following apt went much better they saw no problems at all so I made the dreaded FB announcement and everyone was excited. But of course the apt after that was less good. Well it wasn't bad, but my child, who seems to be like me and can't hold still, kicked the ultrasound wand off twice so they didn't get to see everything they wanted. I guess I'll never feel really ok about it until she comes out with all organs and limbs intact. Remember how I said in the first sonogram I had no idea what I was looking at. I now can tell exactly what they are looking at, lungs, kidneys, brain, heart, I know it all now.
As of today I have 92 days to go. I am feeling much better. I can eat again and sleep. In fact most of the things that are wrong with me now are down right normal. I pee every 20 mins, my back is killing me, I get kicked day and night and my ribs are sore. No swelling or stretch marks and I am still an innie, so that is good. Also I am now gaining about 1lbs a week. Also good. However, I lost all my muscle mass so I am pretty weak. If I stand up or move around for more then a few hours my uterus swells and my belly actually gets bigger and harder so I have to take it really easy. I may actually get to go back to work soon, which is kind of scary becuase I have been isolated for months and the idea of being around people is sort of daunting, however I want out of my bedroom so badly I can hardly stand it.
As for the stupid OB I found out why they didn't release my records. The head doctor at the practice wanted to know why I had left and was holding onto the records until she spoke to me...boy did I give it to her.
Well that was a long post, but it did cover 6 months. I promise never to rattle on like that again. Also Mom's pool opens in a few days so I won't be stuck inside every day, instead I will get to lie in the pool instead of bed, so I don't plan on having 2 hours to write additional posts. So, so long and farewell for now.
