Upchucking and more

Bug watch 35w1d

• Himself: very active! :)
• Woke up vomiting last night around midnight - lovely!
• No more contractions or anything of the sort.
• Sleeping poorly, exhausted.
• Still heavy pressure on cervix, some discharge.

So far, so good. I really don't want to have this Bug earlier than 37 weeks for his sake and earlier than 38 weeks for my own. For anyone that reads this blog regularly, you've heard my reasoning behind this: there is a huge project as work deploying in late October and I really, really, really don't want to come back from maternity leave to the frantic end of that project. If I can, at least, make it to Monday 8/9, I'll be assured that the 11 weeks I'll be taking (combo of FML, vacation and unpaid) will have me coming back on the day it deploys. But I'd love to be able to pad a couple of more weeks on to that and come back more like mid-November, once things have settled down. So, stay put, little boy!

I forgot to mention on Tuesday's update that I had lost 4lbs since the previous weigh-in at the OB the week before. Bizarre!! I'm certainly more huge, so I think the big difference is fluid retention and dehydration. It explains my tight-belly pain over the weekend and my feet and hands were extremely deflated from previous days, so I really think it was 5-6 lbs of fluid loss which explains the 4lb loss despite Bug and belly growing. So, as it stands now, I'm up 25lbs since pre-pregnancy, but I fully expect that to zig back up by quite a bit at next week's appointment.

Not much else going on - work is busy, on Bug watch. I drive into Boston tonight to meet DH for our hospital tour. I've seen the workings of the OB dept there quite a few times, for reasons good and bad, but we figured we should do this final rite of passage. I am so, so tired from my little barf episode plus just lots of hip pain, flipping, peeing that I'm hoping I can squeeze in nice nap on my lunch hour. It'll be inspirational, I think, to see all the cute, little babies in the nursery at the end of the tour -- motivation to keep chugging along! ;)

Oh! And I think we've narrowed down the name list to two!!! This is real progress! I'm comfortable going in with two names and waiting until we see his little face to decide on the final one. :)

OK, I would like some of my street cred back, please

So, after my little drama on Saturday/Sunday, I was feeling a little less than superwoman. I like to think of myself as a trooper, not even close to a whiner. I can usually roll with the punches with the best of them so I was surprised to find myself whimpering over a tight belly when the nurses and on-call OB told me that they weren't even real contractions and that my cervix was high and tight, blah, blah, blah. But this world of late pregnancy is a tough one and I was just accepting I was being a little more beat down by it than I would have predicted.

But haha, strange OB and nurses!!! I had my 35 week OB appointment this morning and my real OB checked me out and said I was 2cm dilated and that the baby was "way, way low down" and she would not be surprised to see me deliver within a week!!!! Holy shnickeys!!! That was NOT what I expected to hear!! She validated me by saying that she definitely thinks what I was experiencing over the weekend were real contractions because that's really the only way Bug's head would cram down that low. Ha! Victory is mine!! I have been walking around with a watermelon on my cervix and enduring it without whimper because I had been told "Oh, it's going to get so much worse."

My sanctimonious victory over the on-call OB and nurses was short-lived however, as the panic set in that this Bug could come basically ANY TIME! Yowza!! Like I stated earlier, my OB's best guess is in the next 1-2 weeks but that she's had women in the same state in the past who made it to 40 weeks. She wants me to take it as easy as possible for the next few weeks, because she'd obviously really like to get him to 37 weeks at least. No more weeding for me. And as soon as possible, we'll finalize the critical last pre-Bug steps like getting the car seat base installed and packing our hospital bag.

Other points of interest (this was a juicy OB appt!) was that the cut on my arm that wouldn't clot could be due to low platelet counts and I was sent off for some bloodwork. If it's borderline low, it could be treated with steroids, but if it's really low, it could require a transfusion and they would deliver asap. Yeah, I told you this one was juicy.  I have to imagine that it's not that bad because after giving blood, the injection site didn't continue to bleed, so I'm going to assume everything is good on this front.

Finally, beloved OB sent me off to an ultrasound because the baby was measuring small for his age. I pretty much knew that Bug was playing a trick on her, because this kid is huge and he only decided to flatten himself out for a joke as she was measuring. But I wasn't going to turn down a free u/s! But let me tell you - an ultrasound at this late stage is BORing! The babies are so big, you can't see the cute waving of limbs or swimming or anything. It's a tush here, a foot there, but nothing all on the same screen. If you're lucky, you can get a look at the face, but since Bug was so low - as the radiologist said, "absurdly low" - we couldn't even get that. But it was still fun to see his little heart beating away. Anyhoo, usually they can get a pretty accurate weight estimate by measuring the head, but because Bug was so (absurdly) low, he wasn't able to do that and instead had to measure the femur and a few other things. He told me to get dressed and he was going to crunch the numbers. He said the average weight for a 35-weeker is around 5.2lbs and we wanted Bug to be in the 20% percentile at least to not be concerned (I think the 20th percentile is @ 4lbs). Well, he does his measurements and comes back to tell me that Bug is coming out to be 6.9 lbs! Haha! And weep! If he's 6.9lbs by now, at 40 weeks he could easily be 12lbs!!! But I refuse to believe that the universe would be so cruel to me after all we've been through to get here, so I'm assuming that Bug is just long and lanky with a smaller head than these limbs would suggest.

Oh, and by the way, we still don't have a name!!!!!!

More-drama-than-wanted weekend

You kinda think that by the time you get to 35 weeks of pregnancy, that big drama you're waiting on is the bambino's arrival, right? Well, us longtimer IFers should know better by now...

NoodleGuy's cousin, who had been staying with us for 2 weeks while attending a vet internship in Boston left on saturday morning. We took her out to brunch and then we puttered around for a while. I went shopping in the afternoon (word to wise: never go fall shoe shopping while 8 months pg) and came back and we relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. Around 6pm, we were making pasta for dinner, and I started having some BH contractions. Nothing major, but the strongest I've felt before and painful. They went on from about 6-8pm, not wonderful when they clenched, but no biggie. Then around 8pm, I had another clench that just never went away. I was so uncomofortable all night and barely slept, i couldn't get in any position that wasn't painful and my abdomen was SO hard. However, Bug seemed fine, he was dancing up a storm -- possible because the clenching was tightening up his condo.

I still felt like total crap in the morning and while I knew I wasn't in labor, we thought I should get checked out anyway. So we called in, went in yesterday a.m.. Indeed, no labor signs, cervix was high and tight. Bug looked great on the monitor and though I had 1 or 2 minor contractions while there, nothing real. It was frustrating because I was basically writhing in pain, so uncomfortable and the really nice OB on call said there wasn't a ton they could do. They suggested constipation, dehydration, maybe eating something that disagreed with me and to take Tylenol, go home hydrate like crazy and rest up. So we did so and I was pretty miserable still thru about 4pm. Around that time, NG gave me an awesome massage and I was hydrating like crazy, drinking a 32 oz cup of water every hour and by 9pm or so starting feeling better. I didn't sleep great last night, but much better and feel pretty good this morning. I slept in until about 8:30 and feel pretty OK as of now.

I'm still hydrating and can only assume it was dehydration even though I do drink alot. But we have been running around for weeks, helping DH's parents move and my baby shower, etc. Plus, we had eaten alot of spicy/salty foods in the past weeks, so I'm sure that contributed. I was in tears at the thought of going 5 more weeks feeling like that, but hopefully, if I make a concerted effort to drink like crazy going forward, we'll be OK until D-Day.

But, folks, that wasn't all -- during my massage, NG found a little zit on my arm and scratched it off. No biggie, didn't bleed or anything. But somehow during the night, I must have scratched it open again. I woke up to pee for the 12th time at 3:30am and felt something tickling my arm. I looked down and there was blood running down my arm from the little , teeny cut/zit. I went back in the bedroom to show NG and turned on the light and there was blood everywhere, like a small animal had been murdered in my bed. Truly bizarre. It's like the little scratch isn't clotting at all -- even this morning when I took off the bandaid, it started bleeding again. Dr. Google tells me that the heavy bleeding from a small cut isn't abnormal, with all the excess blood volume in pregnant lady's bodies, tiny cuts bleed a ton. But what is perplexing me is the lack of clotting - I thought pregnant ladies clot too much. Anyway, I have an OB appt tomorrow morning and boy, she'll get her money's worth! Usually I'm the mellow, easy patient who has had no issues (except that darned yeast infection). This time I'll have tons to talk about! :)

**EDITED TO ADD ** I forgot to mention that I did a fair amount of weeding on Saturday afternoon, a few hours before the abdominal pain started. NG and I can only guess that it contributed to the dehydration and/or maybe I strained my ab muscles a little bit. But, dang, the side door walkway looks SO much better ;).