I Guess the 37th Week is the Cupcake Week

Oh, memories. This week I started the official paperwork for my maternity leave. I get no cell service at my desk, so I had to step out of the building for a few minutes to call our HR system to kick off the process, and as I sat down on the bench in the patio I realized that it was almost a year to the day to when this whole mess started. Last October, I was calling HR to work out how many consecutive days off I could take after my surgery to remove the endometriomas on my ovaries, and I had forgotten that when you call the first thing you hear is the automated message: "If you are calling regarding a pregnancy claim, press 1. For all other claims, press 2." It was tough to hear that last year, knowing that I might never get pregnant. This year, even with my unborn child doing his best to tap out messages in Morse code from inside my uterus, it was still bittersweet.

What else is new? Well, my hips have started hurting in a way that simply cannot be ignored (and, like Shakira, my hips don't lie.) It's probably that the ligaments are starting to relax in preparation for, gulp, delivery. I've also switched over from once-daily Lovenox injections to twice-daily injections of unfractionated Heparin. They are incredibly uneventful, especially since I've had so many months to refine my technique (don't pinch the skin too hard as you inject!) and the bruises have been kept to a minimum. It is kind of daunting to inject, look at the clock, and think "well, if I go into labor right now, how many hours before I can get an epidural?" Oh! And last week's ultrasound confirmed that the little one is indeed vertex, or head-down, so there's nothing to worry about there. No transverse presentation here.

Also, this happened:

:-)

Posts I Didn't Get Time to Write

As I mentioned in my last post about the non-stress tests, last week was a bit, oh, busy. Scratch that - last week was insane. It was the culmination of a two-year long project at work and I am thrilled to say that everything was finished as of 6 PM on Friday night, but it left very little time for anything else, including sleeping, eating, and blogging. That didn't stop me from composing blog updates in my head, however, so without further ado, here are the things I've wanted to tell you from over the past week:

My uterus isn't the only one who's feeling irritable
The non-stress test last Tuesday morning was only slightly eventful - most of the time I sat there with the elastic bands over my belly (one is a Doppler that measures the baby's heart rate and the other is a pressure sensor) and sipped apple juice or water. The baby performed marvelously by kicking or fidgeting occasionally and his little heart rate would go right up by about 10 beats per minute before settling back down to baseline. My uterus, however, was not as compliant. The monitor showed a series of minor peaks and valleys, kind of like gentle waves on a breezy day out on the water. Apparently, I am having some light contractions about once every minute and I'm not even conscious of them (I did not get a Braxton-Hicks contraction during the test, which would have been interesting to compare since I am definitely aware of those!) However, they don't appear to be making any differences to my cervix, which remains long and closed. The diagnosis: irritable uterus. The treatment plan: none, since it's apparently normal at this stage of pregnancy.

But who else was feeling irritable? Why, that would be me, every time I had to sneeze or cough or blow my nose from the awful cold I came down with last week. Perfect timing, as ever; sleep went from difficult to impossible and I had no way of taking any time off work to try to recover. The weekend was helpful in that regard although I think I'm going to have to give in and take a Mucinex since my lingering cough is a little scary to bystanders.

Breastfeeding Class, or as we called it, Boob-Food Class
Breastfeeding class turned out to be held in the same room where we attended childbirth class, so Harry and I settled right into the same seats and had our pillows ready (seriously, we brought two after the last debacle, and this time we didn't need them at all. Of course.) The instructor went through a Powerpoint presentation that was only slightly preachy, we practiced holding baby dolls in some of the recommended positions, and we watched an amazing video about the rooting reflex and how babies instinctively find the nipple. I do feel more prepared to breastfeed now, and it was worth the $30 registration fee. But.

Why does everything with women's health have to become politicized? Seriously, I want to breastfeed. I will admit that it's not something that I'm particularly looking forward to doing. (Feed a person every 2 hours using my body? On the surface it just sounds less fun than many other activities - it's not like someone is proposing I eat a slice of pie every 2 hours.) But it seems intuitively like the best choice for my child, and I like how natural it is, and many women have no problems with the actual process so why start worrying proactively. What I really don't like about the pro-breastfeeding message is that I feel it overestimates how good it is for the baby, and it underestimates the value of women's time. Sure, the research is there that breastfeeding is better than formula feeding... but only in a very few, highly specific ways, and even those advantages may not be as impressive as first stated when the research came out (such is the difficulty of doing large-scale randomized controlled double-blind studies on infants and nursing mothers.) And it is free to breastfeed, but only if a woman's time is free, and for many women that's just not the case. I feel torn between wanting to validate the importance of motherhood and childcare and breastfeeding, and wanting to stand on the side of the working moms who balance many different obligations and ultimately choose formula as the best overall choice for them and their families.

Your bump looks different
On Friday afternoon, a colleague said in passing that my belly looked different. I glanced down, saw nothing immediately out of the ordinary, and laughed about eating too much pizza for lunch. Later that night, I went into the bathroom at our house and looked in the full-length mirror, and... wait a minute. I turned from one profile to the other and then called for Harry to come up and verify what I was seeing. The baby has definitely dropped - my bump is much lower than it was 24 hours previously. His little foot used to be kicking right under my ribs, and now it's consistently about 2 inches lower; the bulk of his body seems to be a little lower, and I'm peeing even more frequently than before.

Naturally, Harry and I both panicked that I was about to go into labor, so we packed the hospital bag we had been meaning to put together, started a load of laundry, took the dog out, etc. Turns out the baby can drop up to 4 weeks before your due date (and I was at 36w1d when we noticed it) so it was actually a nonevent, but it was a good reminder that we need to get a little serious about this. Part of getting serious was heading back out to our friendly neighborhood maternity store, since I realized I had basically no breastfeeding-friendly clothing besides one bra and a few sundresses that weren't going to cut it as we move from fall into winter. I had also been freezing at work for the past two weeks (cf. the aforementioned sundresses, which were starting to look and feel comically impractical on crisp 50-degree autumn mornings.) I have a new pair of pants, some tights, a few nice pajamas for my hospital stay, and a bunch of tank tops with snaps so I can flash onlookers anytime I want. Remember buying clothes just because they were cute? Yeah, me either.

In conclusion, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to go into labor before my maternity leave starts on Oct. 5th, but we'll see. That's a story for another time!

These Non-Stress Tests are Stressing Me Out!

My appointment with the OB went well, although since I have an ultrasound scheduled for next week (more on that in a moment) she didn't weigh in on the transverse/vertex question. Sorry everybody, we'll just have to keep waiting - what incredible suspense, right!?!

However, she said something that I hadn't been expecting to hear: apparently, since this has been a somewhat eventful pregnancy, she wants me to start having Non-Stress Tests at 36 weeks. Which is, um, next week. Which is also a HUGE week for me at work (the culmination of a two-year-long project) and I had previously made sure to schedule absolutely nothing to conflict with it. Basically, since the beginning of my pregnancy I've been keeping one eye on the calendar to make sure that I would be available to do whatever I needed to at the office in order to meet this deadline on Friday Sept. 21st. The only way I should be missing work next week is in case of a dire emergency or if I go into labor, which of course could totally happen, so it's going to be a nail-biter to the very end.

I mentioned to my OB that I really couldn't come in at that time, especially toward the end of the week, and she was very understanding and suggested that I go right out to the front desk after my appointment to talk with her scheduling staff and find as convenient a time as possible. Except that the staff weren't able to help me at that exact moment - one person was at lunch, one person wasn't picking up her phone, etc. - so I left my phone number with them and they said the scheduler would call me as soon as possible to discuss my predicament.

That is why I was mildly annoyed when the scheduler called me the next day and began rattling off a list of dates and times that I need to come in for these 3-hour long appointments (yes, you read that right, apparently this takes 3 hours. My OB's practice does the NST first, then an ultrasound, then you meet with one of their docs to discuss the findings, so it's basically half of the workday when you factor in travel time. Does every doctor do this, or am I just lucky?) The first test was scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 20, exactly when I most need to be in the office helping complete this project. I don't envy this person her job - scheduling these things day in and day out must get frustrating - but I kind of feel like as the patient, it's not unreasonable for me to expect that my schedule might be included in the mix as well. I mean, if I can't get to the appointment, how will the party actually get started? And in this specific case, I was very clear at the outset that coming in at any point that week would be problematic, so it was particularly irritating that she just assumed I would be free. No, she said, there were no other appointments so this was the only time they could see me. Click.

I went back and forth over this for a while. Am I a selfish mother for putting my work first? Should I be doing everything I can to monitor my baby even though everything appears to be fine? My MFM didn't think NSTs were necessary at this stage, so is this a second opinion kind of situation? How bad is it if I just cancel the appointment and say "sorry, guys, see you at 37 weeks"? What if I keep the appointment on the books for now, and wait until that day to decide whether I can make it after all?

In the end, I sent my doctor an email, her nurse returned my call, I explained my situation, and this very kind nurse and I are now having a date on Tuesday morning where she will personally run my NST. It's not ideal, but it's a lot better than having to cancel 20 minutes before the Thursday appointment, which was a real possibility. All's well that ends well, but it did get me thinking about the many difficult choices faced by working parents, and how I'm about to be a working mom myself. If I had skipped the test and something bad had happened to the baby, I might never have forgiven myself. But if I had skipped work on such an unbelievably crucial day and the test revealed nothing out of the ordinary, I would be mad about that too (plus I'd be facing the wrath of my coworkers.) There's no perfect solution.

Coming soon: Breastfeeding class! Maternity clothes, part 2! Unrealistic expectations for my upcoming leave!

Okay, Now I'm Just Making Stuff Up

Baby boy and I appear to be doing fine. He likes it when I eat sweet things (at least, if one can interpret kicking and flailing limbs as "I like this") and I'm doing fine as well (my ankles aren't even that swollen!) And he's even been vertex - a.k.a. head down, the preferred position for a vaginal birth - for some weeks now. I was so proud of him when they told me that after my last scan, especially since they said he's so big now that he's unlikely to move out of his current A+ configuration. I just knew that my kid was a GENIUS.

Except... on Thursday, he was really really active in there. Huge, sweeping motions that were hard to interpret. And when I went to bed that night, I spent some time lying on my back and poking around trying to figure out what the various lumps of baby that I could feel through my belly might indicate. Is this a head? Is this a bottom? Maybe! Probably! Sure, why not?

Based on this highly unscientific analysis, I am worried that the baby is no longer vertex but actually transverse. Or am I? He still has time to turn, if he really is transverse. And so what if he stays transverse for the rest of the pregnancy? It means I'll have to have a C-section. Big deal. (Yes, yes, I recognize that this would be a very big deal to a woman planning a minimal-intervention vaginal birth; I am more on the side of "there's no good way to get this baby out of me, so let's just see what happens.")

I have an OB appointment coming up this week and an MFM appointment with the fancy ultrasound next week, so we'll have our answer soon. In the meantime, if anyone wants to place any bets, just let me know...

Gobble Gobble, Waddle Waddle

This is a picture of a turkey! Not of me!

No, sadly, this is not a post about my amazing turkey impression. (I wish. I'm secretly super jealous of people who can do a realistic gobble sound.) This is a post about how I can't stop eating, and I have started to waddle when I walk. Fun times.

About three weeks ago, I noticed that I was beginning to walk a bit differently than I usually do. That's not to say that I normally do the model walk with one foot directly in front of the other, my hips swinging my designer dress from side to side (ha!) It's just that my gait is now ever-so-slightly wider than it has been, edging over into a distinctive late-pregnancy waddle. And I still have up to 7 weeks to go, so this should be interesting! If I get round enough, do you think I could start rolling places instead?

Around the same time, I began to notice the return of the pregnancy food cravings. For months I've been smugly telling people that I did have cravings that were tied in with my morning sickness, but after that resolved near the end of the first trimester, I've just been eating normally. NOT ANYMORE. I want huge amounts of food, and I want what I want when I say I want it. There was one memorable day that I was obsessing about brownies and spent hours looking up recipes online before I came home and baked a big pan of them, but in general, I've wanted food with lots of protein and a measurable amount of fat. I dream of roast chicken (with gravy!), meatloaf topped with a ketchup crust, bananas slathered in peanut butter, whole lobsters straight off the grill, etc. I also drink like crazy (water, you guys. Come on now.) I want my protein and I want my ice water and I start to get legitimately irritable if I can't get these things, which makes me even more fun to live with than usual.

But at least I'm getting exercise, right? Um, yeah. I'm going to start back up with my prenatal yoga DVD any day now, I swear. Just as soon as I'm done waddling to the kitchen and back.