hypothyroid – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

I had my 12 week appointment with my midwife today and she couldn’t find the heartbeat with the doppler. She warned me that it was hit and miss at this age, that the fetus is small enough to find places to hide. She said some women opt to not even try at this stage because they don’t want to worry. But I wanted to try.

She thought she maybe heard the heartbeat fleetingly at first, but couldn’t find it again. She also thinks my placenta is probably at the front which makes it even more difficult. My uterus is growing appropriately, though, as is my belly, so chances are that everything is fine. Still, it’s just nice to hear that heartbeat for the first time, you know?

I opted to skip the 12 week ultrasound and just do the anatomical scan at 20 weeks which means the next scheduled stab at finding a heartbeat is in a month — at 16 weeks. My midwife said that if it’s eating at me, then I can stop by any Thursday morning when she has office hours and she’ll try again. God I love the quality of care you get with midwifery. They always make time for you. I’m not sure that I’ll need to take her up on it, but it’s good to know that I can drop in if anything doesn’t feel right.

I also wanted to follow up on something the endocrinologist said; she was surprised I hadn’t had thyroid issues with my previous two pregnancies. I asked my midwife if my thyroid levels were even tested before since this time around I had routine blood work done at the same time as my prenatal and I didn’t know which test detected the hypoactive thyroid. She told me that thyroid levels aren’t tested for in standard prenatal blood work and then looked back in my charts. Sure enough, they hadn’t tested my thyroid levels during either pregnancy.

So what does that mean? It means how long I’ve been hypo is anyone’s guess. I know I thought I felt fine before this pregnancy, but I also know that I haven’t been able to shake the extra 20 pounds I’ve been carrying around since Irene was born. Within a year and a half of having Colum, after gaining 50 pounds during his pregnancy, I was down within five pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight. I had chalked it up to not being quite as active this time around and being a couple years older, but who knows? Maybe it was my thyroid all along.

Gotta love those appointments that raise more questions than they answer.

On the bright side, Colum has dubbed the new baby Jo Jo, which I actually kind of like for an unborn baby nickname. It’s sexually ambiguous, cute and ridiculous enough that you won’t be tempted to actually use it.

I did it!

For the first time ever I managed to keep a pregnancy a secret for the entire first trimester. As of this Thursday I will be exactly 12 weeks pregnant with my third child due on September 30th. Do you know what this means? It means I can finally let the cat out of the bag and let my belly out of my jeans. Because by the third go around, there’s not a lot left besides a denim waistband to hold my uterus in place.

Ah, maternity jeans. (What? You don't keep your only full-length mirror in the playroom?)

Why wait now? The main reason is because this time I have a near five-year old’s feelings to consider. I didn’t want to tell the kids about the new baby (or worse, have them overhear us talking to other adults about it) and then have to disappoint them in the event of a miscarriage. This time I would play the odds and wait. Also, did I mention this is my third pregnancy? It’s not the life-changing and overwhelmingly exciting event that my first and second were.

Except, of course, that it is life changing. I mean, I can barely keep up with the two kids I already have, my sub-par housekeeping standards and my two-hour-a-day job as is. What am I thinking throwing a newborn into the mix? We haven’t even finished the third bedroom of this house yet. This could be a bad idea, so bad it’s funny, I thought. And then, the same way every indie musician is constantly coming up with new band names, I thought that a humour blog about a third pregnancy named “Ill Conceived” would be perfect. Not that I actually found the time to pitch the idea to anyone or anything. (Email me if you need a pregnancy blogger!)

Then the other shoe dropped. And by shoe I actually mean blood test and by dropped I mean less than stellar results came in. I went to my family doctor at around 5.5 weeks after getting a positive pee stick result. (The generic brand still rocks my world for $5 and change!) I told her that I hadn’t actually bothered getting the routine blood work she’d requisitioned months earlier done, so could she just write me a new one with a pregnancy test and the standard prenatal work added to it? I know the ropes by now and I also know that a blood lab is likely to have better luck finding my puny little veins than my midwife. I was wrong. The lab tech had to draw all six viles of blood from my hand. Ouch.

The doctor’s office calls me a week later to say that the lab had mislabeled half my blood work and that they would mail me a requisition to get it taken again. Yippee. This time it was a new lab and a new tech and she found my vein. At least there was that. Because the next week I came home to find a message from the doctor’s office saying she needed to see me the next day to discuss my results and I had an appointment at noon. No real choice in the matter. Gulp.

It turns out that my thyroid levels were not so hot. They were pretty low, in fact, when they’re supposed to go up during pregnancy. It also turns out that thyroid hormones are pretty essential to the neurological and cognitive development of the fetus, much of which takes place during the first trimester. So my doctor wrote me a prescription for synthetic hormones that I needed to start taking that day and said she would book me into an endocrinologist and I would likely need blood drawn every six weeks during pregnancy to monitor my hormone levels and regular appointments with the specialist on top of the standard prenatal care I’d get from my midwife. Oh, and there’s a good chance that this could be a chronic condition.

Ill conceived all right. It works on so many levels. Dammit.

I don’t know how long I’ve had a hypoactive thyroid. I do know that I felt fine until I got pregnant. Then I felt tired. It was normal first trimester fatigue, I assumed, except it was crazy intense. I could barely get through the days and it felt like I was moving through a fog, a brain fog. Writing more than the bare essential was impossible and I can’t vouch for the quality of any writing I did do during that time. Within a few days of starting the medication I felt better. (Except for the back-to-back bouts of cold and flu.) And now, a month later, I basically feel like my old self.

The good news is that this condition is easily treatable with medication. The slightly disconcerting news is that I didn’t start treatment until I was 8 weeks along. From what I read on the internet *smirk* and what the med student at my endocrinology and pregnancy clinic told me, there’s not much to worry about. The important thing is that I’m getting treated now and the chances of any adverse affects are quite slim. (The adverse affects would simply be a less smart kid.) So I’m not going to worry, I’ve decided, and I’m actually doing a pretty good job of it.

Don’t you worry either, but please do catch up with me here as I blog about daily life and this pregnancy.