It's been a while. Mostly because there's been nothing to update. Nothing much has happened. Literally, nothing. I mean, my boobs stopped hurting, so I guess I've got that going for me. But otherwise, not much of anything. It's been a giant waiting game, and a lot of "If I didn't know I was pregnant, I wouldn't know I was pregnant" going on. That in itself can be sort of stressful, because you start wondering if there's something wrong since you're not doing all of the normal first trimester stuff you read about on the internet. So far, it's just been me, being me. Hell, I've even LOST weight. Not sure how that happened, except that I've been pretty disinterested in eating anything sugary, and the removal of sugar from my diet might have caused me to lose 3 pounds. Wouldn't be shocking. But, all in all, it's been uneventful. I'm pretty grateful for that, for the most part. But it does leave time for the imagination to run wild.
Last week we had our first official doctor's appointment. That was interesting. Not quite what I expected from anything I've been reading on the interwebz. Everything said it would take a really long time, be prepared to be there for hours and answer a ton of questions, have your spouse there to answer questions, blah blah blah. We were there for less than an hour. No real questions to answer. They handed me a book, some paperwork to take for a blood draw, no real conversation to any of that. Then they did a vaginal ultrasound, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, to take some measurements and make sure there was nothing overly abnormal. That's where the heart attack part came in. First, I have to be in a room, wearing a hospital gown, basically spread eagle for a doctor and a nurse to stare at me while my husband sat in a chair nearby being a patient audience member. I get a wand stuck up my hoo-ha, they turn on the screen and we see.......nothing. Literally, nothing. Black uterus, and nothing. So, the solution to this is to start jabbing the wand around to try to find something, which is again as awesome as it sounds. Jab. Nothing. Jab. Nothing. Jab. Nothing. Lots of jabbing, lots of nothing. I know this only went on for about a minute, but it seemed like an eternity, and I just kept thinking "Well.......if I was wrong about all of this, that's going to be embarrassing". And I started to panic and wonder if you can really get two false pregnancy tests, and if just not having your period for a couple of months is totally normal for some people. My brain started going all sorts of crazy places, like to the recurring dream I'd been having that I wasn't actually pregnant, it was just a rare form of cancer that masked as pregnancy. Jab. Something. Finally. Something small, and gray, and basically blob-like showed up on the screen and I thought for a moment "Baby or tumor?" when the doctor said "There we go, there's a heartbeat and a head" and vaguely pointed at the screen to the things that were somewhere within the blob. I have no idea how she saw a heartbeat or head. I saw nothing but gray blob. But, it was a gray blob that she was confirming was in fact a baby. Like, a real one. That apparently had a heartbeat. So, that was real. That was different. That was, after all that jabbing, a bit of a relief. She took some measurements and concluded that my due date was off, so that kind of sucked. I really wanted to squeak by before the end of my insurance plan year this year because then literally all of this would be free since my deductible was met earlier in the year. Maybe the kid will be early? Hard to say. But, point is, it's in there and maybe just a couple of weeks off on the original due date in December. They printed off some pictures of the ultrasound, which were sort of useless because all you could see was the dotted measurement line they took on the screen. The gray blob wasn't even really visible. But, we had vague photos of it at that point. Then, the wand was removed, I was told to get dressed, she talked to me for a minute about the different due date, said there would be another appointment in July and sent me on my way. Nothing more. Rather anticlimactic after all of the searching and jabbing. But, she did say everything looked fine, so I guess that's ok. Or at least moderately less nerve wracking.
I go back on the 19th of June to do a screening for downs syndrome and a few other genetic abnormalities, and I guess at that point we can tell people. That seems weird to me too. I mean, that's putting the cart before the horse, I guess, since I still have 3 weeks to go to get to that point, and things can go badly between now and then. I keep worrying they will, honestly, but I guess for the time being, everything looks ok. We'll see how it goes.
Last week we had our first official doctor's appointment. That was interesting. Not quite what I expected from anything I've been reading on the interwebz. Everything said it would take a really long time, be prepared to be there for hours and answer a ton of questions, have your spouse there to answer questions, blah blah blah. We were there for less than an hour. No real questions to answer. They handed me a book, some paperwork to take for a blood draw, no real conversation to any of that. Then they did a vaginal ultrasound, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, to take some measurements and make sure there was nothing overly abnormal. That's where the heart attack part came in. First, I have to be in a room, wearing a hospital gown, basically spread eagle for a doctor and a nurse to stare at me while my husband sat in a chair nearby being a patient audience member. I get a wand stuck up my hoo-ha, they turn on the screen and we see.......nothing. Literally, nothing. Black uterus, and nothing. So, the solution to this is to start jabbing the wand around to try to find something, which is again as awesome as it sounds. Jab. Nothing. Jab. Nothing. Jab. Nothing. Lots of jabbing, lots of nothing. I know this only went on for about a minute, but it seemed like an eternity, and I just kept thinking "Well.......if I was wrong about all of this, that's going to be embarrassing". And I started to panic and wonder if you can really get two false pregnancy tests, and if just not having your period for a couple of months is totally normal for some people. My brain started going all sorts of crazy places, like to the recurring dream I'd been having that I wasn't actually pregnant, it was just a rare form of cancer that masked as pregnancy. Jab. Something. Finally. Something small, and gray, and basically blob-like showed up on the screen and I thought for a moment "Baby or tumor?" when the doctor said "There we go, there's a heartbeat and a head" and vaguely pointed at the screen to the things that were somewhere within the blob. I have no idea how she saw a heartbeat or head. I saw nothing but gray blob. But, it was a gray blob that she was confirming was in fact a baby. Like, a real one. That apparently had a heartbeat. So, that was real. That was different. That was, after all that jabbing, a bit of a relief. She took some measurements and concluded that my due date was off, so that kind of sucked. I really wanted to squeak by before the end of my insurance plan year this year because then literally all of this would be free since my deductible was met earlier in the year. Maybe the kid will be early? Hard to say. But, point is, it's in there and maybe just a couple of weeks off on the original due date in December. They printed off some pictures of the ultrasound, which were sort of useless because all you could see was the dotted measurement line they took on the screen. The gray blob wasn't even really visible. But, we had vague photos of it at that point. Then, the wand was removed, I was told to get dressed, she talked to me for a minute about the different due date, said there would be another appointment in July and sent me on my way. Nothing more. Rather anticlimactic after all of the searching and jabbing. But, she did say everything looked fine, so I guess that's ok. Or at least moderately less nerve wracking.
I go back on the 19th of June to do a screening for downs syndrome and a few other genetic abnormalities, and I guess at that point we can tell people. That seems weird to me too. I mean, that's putting the cart before the horse, I guess, since I still have 3 weeks to go to get to that point, and things can go badly between now and then. I keep worrying they will, honestly, but I guess for the time being, everything looks ok. We'll see how it goes.