After my last post, y’all made it pretty clear you wanted me to keep on blogging, so here we are. In two days I’ll be at 13 weeks — the last week of the first trimester. It’s pretty wild to say (write) that — I didn’t ever think I’d make it this far.
I’ve been finished with my nightly injections since Feb. 3, and I do not miss them at all. It’s hard to trust that my body is producing what it needs to naturally, but it’s also delightful to not have to stick two needles in my upper back/hip nightly. I’ve also had two appointments at my new OB’s office and met two of the four midwives who work there. I’ll be able to work with them for a little while more, but my understanding is that I’ll be turned over to the doctor sometime in the middle of the second trimester since I’m a high-risk pregnancy (because it was IVF, because I’m considered old for pregnancy, and because I’ll be a C-Section).
They’ve been pretty patient with me, considering I come to each appointment with a notebook page list of questions, need lots of reassurance that slightly off labs don’t mean the end of the world, and call the office with all sorts of questions. They’re having me come in for a check-up every two weeks. I’m not sure if that’s to keep me from freaking out and calling more often or if it’s because it’s normal procedure for high-risk pregnancies. Either way, I’m okay with it.
They did run a full panel of labs at my first appointment with them two weeks ago. Almost everything came back normal except my Vitamin D and my thyroid. My Vitamin D was pretty high, which is weird because most women have low Vitamin D, including me, and I’m not taking any Vitamin D-specific supplements. When I spoke with the nurse about it, she didn’t have a good explanation for it nor could she tell me the impact on the fetus, which wasn’t reassuring and led me down a rabbit hole of Googling (I couldn’t find anything concrete). In any case, they retested it this week and it was normal, so maybe it was a fluke result because I was still on progesterone and estrogen injections at the time?
With the thyroid, two of the four tests were within the normal pregnant range, one was high, and one was low. Since my TSH was normal and the ones that were off weren’t off by much, the midwife isn’t concerned (and I’m trying very hard to remind myself that she came highly recommended and knows what she’s doing). We didn’t retest my thyroid at this last appointment, but I’ll be asking to retest it at the 14 or 16 week appointment.
They also drew blood to test for some chromosomal abnormalities that can be detected in the mother’s bloodstream. All of those came back negative (that’s good), but they’ll need to be verified/correlated with an ultrasound. I haven’t had a “normal” ultrasound since the 9 week one at the fertility clinic, but the midwives have been using a portable ultrasound scanner thing that shows us a live view of the fetus at each visit. The image quality leaves a lot to be desired and reminds me of old TVs — the ones where you’d have to adjust rabbit ear antennas to get a picture behind the snow. There’s no sound and the portable doppler (?) scanner that would provide sound hasn’t been able to pick up any heartbeat sounds yet (they tell me it’s fine and normal and I’m doing my best to trust that), but the portable viewer scanner shows the flickering heartbeat, which means it’s still alive, so I’m going with that for now. The next “real” ultrasound will be at 16 weeks, so only a month to go until we can get confirmation that things are growing as they should and we have more than just a cruddy image of a flickering blob.
In the meantime, I’m still exhausted, not able to eat much, and getting crankier by the day. The nausea/queasiness is very slowly improving — I can eat more during the day, but the “what” I can eat comfortably is still limited. Thankfully I’m able to keep down all the various vitamins they have me taking in the morning, although anything that I eat after late afternoon has a slim chance of staying down. That’s led me to constantly munch on small quantities of things throughout the day between 9:30am and 4pm — I’m pretty sure my coworkers must see me eating something in every meeting. I can’t even look at mac and cheese any more, and this past week was the end of hard boiled eggs and cheese (not together — I’d been eating melted cheese on half a bagel for lunch). This past week I suddenly HAD to have regular Doritos (I blame Super Bowl commercials). I also decided to try ginger ale again based on multiple recommendations, and although I normally can’t stand it, it is helping me feel a bit better when my stomach is unhappy.
My poor husband usually sits at the table to eat his dinner alone because the smell of normal dinner food makes my stomach unhappy. However, I think I’m starting to believe there really is an end to this — I can imagine eating chicken or salad again, which wasn’t possible before without a strong physical reaction. I even ate a frozen meal earlier this evening that had more than just salt and pepper as spices in it — a character on a tv show I was watching ate a noodle dish and it looked delicious to me, so I had my husband pick me up an Amy’s vegan Pad Thai frozen meal. We’ll see how that goes, although the fact that I could even stomach the smell is a good sign (I hope).
One thing I really don’t understand is why maternity and nursing bras have tiny, thin straps. This is my current complaint — it just doesn’t make sense. You’d think that bras made for people whose chests are increasing in size would be designed to distribute the weight more evenly across the shoulders, but no. My neck is not happy with me. (And if anyone has recommendations for maternity/nursing bras with straps that are more than 1/2 inch wide, please send them my way.)
Although things seem to be progressing as they should, I can’t quite believe it’s real and keep waiting for the floor to drop out from under me. I’m finally able to have conversations about names and nursery designs with my husband, and can sort of consider registries and baby showers without shutting those thoughts/conversations down completely. Part of my hesitancy is because there’s a superstition in Judaism that it’s bad luck to celebrate the baby before it’s born, and doing so might cause something bad to happen to the mother and/or baby. Of course, that’s not practical — who wants to trust that a nursery will be set-up from scratch with everything you want while in the hospital giving birth? On the other hand, it’s been so hard to get to where we are that I don’t want to do anything that could possibly jinx things. I’m going to have to just get over that superstition, but I won’t lie, it’s hard.
To end this post on a happier note, you may have noticed that I mentioned talking about potential names with my husband. Some people call their growing fetus bean or peanut or whatever. We’ve been calling it Gilgamesh/marcia because my husband is an English Professor and has for years tricked me into clicking links that led to various translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh (yes, we both acknowledge this is a unique way to show affection). The blood test that checked for some chromosomal abnormalities can also tell you whether you’re having a boy or a girl. I’m a planner, and there’s no way I was going to be able to wait until birth to find out that detail.
We’ll be having a Gilgamesh. (No, that won’t be his real name.)