Ultrasound

Well, today was the big day. I have to admit, I had a hard time sleeping last night, I've been so keyed up about this appointment. So, here's how it went.

At 3:20 I arrived for my physical exam, where I had to pee in a cup (again!) but luckily thanks to my enlarging uterus peeing is NOT a problem. In fact, I had to pee 3 times during my 1.5 hour appointment. Go me! They weighed me (gotta love that) and it turns out that I'm down 2 lbs. since the beginning of the month. Thank you nausea, which has been getting worse this week. It's more like a constant companion.

Anyway, I met one of the doctors, Dr. Cal, who seemed pretty nice. The office has three doctors, and you meet all three and choose which one you want to be your primary care provider. But, when it's time to deliver the baby, you get whichever doctor is on duty that day, so that's why they want you to have at least one appointment with each doctor. Anyway, he did his business down there and everything checked out okay.

Then I got to wait in the waiting room for another 20 minutes for the ultrasound techinician, Amy, to finish up with her previous appointment. During that time Mj arrived and I had the awkard pleasure of meeting up with a previous Notre Dame Academy student who was about 6 months pregnant. I couldn't come up with anything better than, "Oh, look at you!" and smile. Oh, well.

Finally, our turn!! The ultrasound itself was amazing, and I wish it could have last an hour instead of 15 minutes! She was able to find the little baby right away, although she said she could have seen it better if I hadn't just peed three times! Well, how was I to know? Regardless, we got to see it okay. In the pictures, you can see it's little head and in one you can see the hands and feet. She focused in on the heart and we were able to see if beating and hear it too. She said the baby's heartrate is 171 beats per minute! No wonder I'm so tired all the time. It was just so amazing to finally see that there really IS something in there, even though it's only one inch long right now.

The last thing she said was that the fetus measured 10 weeks 3 days old. Well, we thought that I was only 9 weeks 4 days along, so it looks like the due date is going to get moved up a bit. She said that when I got back for the my next appointment in 4 weeks they'll examine my uterus and see what size it is and then the doctors will offically change my due date to whatever they think it is.

So, that's the scoop for now. I go back at the end of February for another check-up, but we will only get 2 ultrasounds, so the next and last one will be at 20 weeks. The cool thing is that the 20 week one is with a 3D ultrasound machine, so it looks like an actual picture of your baby's face rather than a blurry black lump. Gotta love modern technology!