Tag: Pregnancy

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12 Week Check Up

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.

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Ill Conceived

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

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.

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66-year-old Mom-to-be Raises More Questions Than Answers

There’s another prego senior in the news this week and the present is looking more and more like some sort of dystopian future. 66-year-old Elizabeth Adeney from England is eight months pregnant thanks to IVF treatments undergone in Ukraine. This is on the heels of the 60-year-old Canadian woman who gave birth to twins in February, and a handful of other 60-plus-year-old women carrying pregnancies to term. I was actually all set to rise to their defense. I had a whole spiel planned out where I lay into the mainstream media for trotting out these freak-show stories under the auspices of ethical concerns. Does anybody really care about the well-being of these families anymore than they care about the Jon and Kate sextuplets, a family of little people, or the outrageously obese of reality tv? Aren’t we really just interested in the spectacle of it all?

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Chug a chug a choo choo, we hear you

We had our 12-week appointment with the midwife on Tuesday and were able to hear the baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler. Colum said it sounds like “Chug a chug a choo choo”. That’s not an altogether inaccurate description, either, but I hope he’s not expecting a baby train. I’m already starting to show and my uterus is a bit bigger than my midwife would expect at this stage. She assures us that this is likely because everything grows more readily in second pregnancies. Since we are pretty sure about our date, the only other explanation would be more than one baby, but nobody’s buying that. Twin pregnancies are often accompanied by pretty extreme first trimester symptoms, but I had only the slightest queasiness here and there and typical fatigue. And there are no twins in my family. We’ll find out for sure at our 18 to 20 week ultrasound, but, like I said, we’re not really worried. Really, hardly at all.

There’s lots to say about midwives versus OBs and I hope to find the time to delve into some of that. I’ve given my notice at the restaurant for the end of May, so I’ve been picking up extra shifts while I can. This will be my last week of extra work, though, and I’ll just cruise through my last month working one shift a week.

Lastly, Colum’s at the stage where his internal dialogue is still external and it can be so funny. I just heard him in the hallway saying, “I going to ask Mom for another one cracker.” And then seconds later he comes charging through the door, “I have another one cracker, Mom?” Don’t you wish we could all be so transparent?

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When to Tell … Fatigue … Pickles & Ice Cream

One of the first decisions you have to make upon finding out that you’re pregnant is who you should tell and when. There are two basic camps: spread the joy right away or wait about 12 weeks. The rationale for waiting is that you won’t have to later spread the word that you are not expecting after all in the case of a miscarriage. With Colum, Ed and I decided to tell our parents and siblings right away, but to wait until the end of the first trimester before letting the rest of the world in. One problem with that approach is that the news is bound to leak, which was okay. More troubling, perhaps, is making excited new grandparents keep such a big secret for nearly two months. This time around, then, we decided to just tell everyone right away and cross the miscarriage bridge if we came to it. I did keep it a secret at my Saturday night job for a good 10 weeks, though, just to be sure. The truth is that I’m just not very good at keeping big news to myself. I’ll keep someone else’s confidence, no problem, and love to keep secrets (like the sex of the baby) from myself, but I can’t imagine not telling my close friends and family about a pregnancy. With my first pregnancy (and baby) I really did think there was a single best way to do things. With enough reading and critical thinking I was sure I could figure out what that best approach was. Now I realize that rules like “Wait 12 weeks before telling” are not for everybody. Don’t get me wrong, though, I still have some strong opinions about what is best for my baby. I’m just a little more open to being proven wrong.

I thought for sure I’d be blogging about this pregnancy non-stop. (That was another reason to share the news right away.) But I was so completely immersed in a fog of fatigue and, let’s face it, stupidity, that it’s been a record-setting six weeks since I’ve posted here. I don’t remember feeling this tired with Colum and I probably wasn’t. For one, I would sleep in as late as I wanted during the first trimester. (I was working nights as a bartender.) And I was drinking caffeine! Colum’s pregnancy was a surprise, so I had to pretty radically change my lifestyle in a hurry. I wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker, but after quitting smoking cold turkey and then dealing with a bar full of drunk university students at 2:30 am, I really did miss those couple of drinks. So when I read that a moderate amount of caffeine had no demonstrable harm on the fetus, I decided that I’d sacrificed enough thank you very much. This time, though, I came across a new study that links caffeine to an increased risk of miscarriage. Add that to my mother’s conviction that coffee caused one of her two miscarriages, and her uncanny ability to be way ahead of the rest of us, and I thought I’d better skip the joe this time around. The haze is finally starting to lift from my frontal lobes, though, and I feel like myself again. Here are some tips for anyone still looking to beat that pregnancy fatigue, but I really think you just have to wait it out in the end. It’s time to gear up for an ultra productive second trimester to make up for lost time and the impending sluggishness of the third trimester.

My other symptoms have been pretty subtle. A bit of queasiness when I forget to eat and some breast tenderness. I’m actually in a bit of awe again at the dramatic breast changes that happen during pregnancy. Last time, I had stretch marks on both breasts after three months and went from a pre-pregnancy 32 B to a 36 DD when my milk came in. I put on a good deal of weight in general, but still. This time there was only a three month window between weaning Colum completely at 18.5 months and getting pregnant again. So I guess I thought all the duct work would still be in place and ready to go. Guess again. Having just nearly returned to my pre-pregnancy size, my breasts are quickly swelling up again with all the weird tugging and tingling sensations that entails. Also, my right nipple is extremely itchy and I haven’t read about that symptom anywhere. My belly is also quickly adopting the pregnant look now that all those pesky abdominal muscles that kept it reigned in for so long last time are nice and loose. I have had some constipation and seem to want to eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies. I’ve also had hankering for salty cured meat, and ice cream, and pickles. But not together. I must say, though, that Colum has really come around to enjoy a “spicy” (as he calls it) dill pickle as well.

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Gary Taubes on prenatal tests

New York Times Magazine allowed top-selling author Gary Taubes, of Good Calories, Bad Calories fame to answer questions from readers. I was pleasantly surprised to find a question about the ethics of some types of prenatal screening given the extremely high rates of false positives and the subsequent stress and anxiety those results can cause. Taubes agrees that this is a problem and that doctors should better inform their patients. He points out, though, that many people simply want to be told what to do and expect their doctors to bear the burden of those types of decisions.

I think Taubes is right here. I am lucky enough to live in Ontario where midwives are regulated and covered by public health care as an alternative to obstetricians. I opted for midwifery care during my pregnancy and was treated to leisurely check ups throughout during which all tests, screenings, etc. were discussed in detail. My midwife informed me about what advocates for or against any given procedure were concerned about and what the standard procedure was. Most doctors, unfortunately, don’t have the time for such detailed discussions and — what’s more — I can imagine members of my own family who simply would not want all those details. And I can certainly understand that. (You don’t want your auto mechanic going over every rationale — just fix it already!) And I’m still not sure that I made the best choice regarding all my procedures. Did I really need that ultrasound at 12 weeks?

But it was my choice in the end. And I am glad to have had it.