Reaching a milestone

Posted by: sarahlou73 on: March 10, 2010

In: 2nd Trimester
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I’m 13 weeks and 4 days pregnant. It feels like it’s taken an age to get to this stage but I made it past the magical 12 week mark. My baby is now a tiny, fully formed human being. How mad is that?!

I think first I need to apologise for not posting for nearly a month!! Thank you so much all for still checking in on my blog, I feel bad that there was nothing new to read! I’ve been really busy as well as rough and the times I have had chance to post, I’ve had serious writers block! To be honest, I wasn’t in a very good place at the end of Feb. I was really down and negative my thoughts wouldn’t have made very nice reading.

So first things first, my scan!!! OMG, it was absolutely AMAZING!!!!! As I’ve just said, I wasn’t feeling great at all and by the time scan day arrived, I was in a right state. I’d tried to change the date but because I was seeing my consultant as well, I had to stick with what I had. That 2 weeks leading up to the scan was as bad as the 2 weeks waiting to find out whether I was pregnant!

So my scan wasn’t til 3pm and I had to sit at my desk at work and just wait. The minutes crawled by and at about 11am a colleague asked me if I was excited and I burst into tears!! I couldn’t stop crying and between sobs I told her how scared I was. All the tension & fear & worry of the last couple of weeks came flooding out. I must admit, I did feel better afterwards but was still all wound up. 2pm finally arrived and when I left work, I got diverted due to road works so the journey home took longer than normal. By the time I got home my nerves were frazzled and I was snapping at my poor boyfriend. My phone was nearly dead and I didn’t have time to put it on charge. I hadn’t drank enough water. On the way to the hospital my car was making a funny noise. You can imagine the frenzy I was in! We got to the hospital dead on 3pm and I had my blood pressure checked and my urine tested (nice!) then got sent into the waiting room. We had to put £5 in a machine to get a token to exchange for the scan pic. 5 flippin’ quid!! Anyway, did that, sat down & waited. And waited. And waited!! I was about to explode when my name got called at 3.35pm.

I lay down on the bed and was surprised to see a flat screen TV in front of me on the wall. I’d barely processed the thought of ‘What if there’s no baby, I’ll see there’s no baby’ when my little baby appeared on the screen. It was love at first sight. He/she was having a right good dance in there. It looked like it was body popping at one point! I couldn’t take my eyes of him/her. Baby measured 5.9mm from crown to rump.

The sonographer was lovely and pointed out all the various bits & pieces and said everything looked fine. She then asked me if I minded her taking some extra measurements. I of course said I didn’t as it meant I got to see baby for longer. It turns out that as of next year, they will offer the nuchal fold test. They’ve had the training and need to practise and record the measurements taken for audit. She tried for nearly 20 minutes to get some measurements but baby wouldn’t stay still for long enough! She gave up in the end. She gave us 4 pictures and also gave us the token back to use next time which I thought was lovely. I hope we have her next time. Anyway, meet my baby…

Baby at 12 weeks & 3 days

I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I felt. We left the room with massive grins on our face. We couldn’t go home because I’d got to see the midwife and the consultant. The midwife went through my notes and we talked in more detail about my strep B and what it means for baby. Basically, when I’m in labour I’ll be given intravenous antibiotics. This should protect baby from picking up the bacteria in the birth canal. If I’m in labour for less than 4 hours, baby will be given antibiotics too. I think I’ll have to stay in for 2 or 3 days so baby can be monitored. She put yellow GBS alert stickers all over my notes and assured me that it was rare for complications and the fact that I know I’ve got it is half the battle. Next I was told I’d have to be tested for gestational diabetes as I’ve got a high BMI so am more at risk. I expected that but was grateful that the midwife wasn’t rude about my weight or anything.

My consultant was a nice lady. She went over the strep B stuff again and then we talked about Spina Bifida. She said I will have a more detailed scan than normal at 20 weeks to check my baby’s spine in depth. I’ll also have a couple of appointments with her later in pregnancy as well as the normal ones with the midwife.

I spoke to both of them about the 16 week blood tests for Down’s etc. I asked whether it means something is defo wrong with baby if the tests come back high risk. It doesn’t, it’s purely a risk factor. My results may come back low risk but my baby could be the 1 in 100,000. That made my mind up. It’s not going to make any difference to me if something is wrong with my baby but I will worry more if I get a high risk result so I’m not going to bother.

Since the scan I’ve felt so much better in myself. It all seems more real. I have a baby in my tummy and I saw it and it makes me smile every time I think about it. I feel like absolute crap most of the time and I do miss the old me occasionally. The me that was able to concentrate for more than 30 seconds at a time. The me that loved chocolate. The me that didn’t get up 3 times in the night for the loo. The me that could do mad things like rock off to London after work, get back late and go to work the next day. It’s only temporary though and I’ll go through & give up anything for this baby