Chasing A Child: 18w4d

18w4d

Another visit to the Doc today. As she bounced in the door, she shook her head in wonder -- "The weeks just fly by! 18 weeks! Can you believe it?" She's totally in love with this pregnancy.

It took her awhile to find the heartbeat. I knew she was looking in the wrong place. The wand was way down on my abdomen, and the past few days has been nothing but stretching and pain in the area around my belly button. The area above my belly button and below my breasts has been sore and sloping in an outwards direction, where before it was a bit concave. I've been explaining to the Mister that the little stowaway is clearly busy growing upwards and pushing my guts up into my upper rib cage, but he's not experiencing the physicality of what I'm talking about, and I could tell he was sweating bullets as the silent seconds ticked by.

Finally, Doc moved the wand up near my middle, and we heard the regular thump-thump-thump-thump. After listening for a minute or so, she started grinning. "Do you hear that sound right there?" I had thought it was my guts bubbling around or something, but Doc said no, it's the baby moving. And sure enough, when we listened carefully, we could hear the heartbeat plus the swishing sound of somersaults through liquid or shoulders brushing against uterine walls or something. The Mister was entranced. All I could think was, how come I can't feel this yet? Soon, I know. Patience.

This week's changes have been really obvious. Friends at work are finally noting that I'm popping out a bit. The stretching in my ribcage and belly button is making those areas really tender. And my darn chest has now outgrown some of my medium-sized maternity tops. Guess I'd better invest in some more in size L. I've never been a L in my life!

I filled out the pre-registration packet for the hospital. How weird is that?!

And this Sunday, we'll go in for the big scan to make sure all the baby's organs are as they should be. Hoping we can find out gender while we're at it.

Oh, forgot to mention that our second set of bloodwork for genetic screening came back perfectly fine, so no amnio or nuchal fold measuring for us! Of course, I did receive several confused calls from the genetic counselor, trying to clarify the whole donor embryo thing. Once she understood that I'm a 46-year-old woman having a baby from a 27-year-old egg, we were fine. But it completely confused their computer system, because I had another call from another counselor and apparently my file got referred to a perinatologist. That actually turned out to be a good thing -- Doc said the peri advised her to give me several extra scans as we go along, and if all is well by week 34, then proceed with AMA guidelines, which basically means they'll induce me at 39 weeks. At this point, 39 weeks seems like a thousand years, but I know the time will fly.

*****

With sincere apologies to those who are uncomfortable with pregnant bellies ... On the left, 14 weeks. On the right, yesterday. Really looking forward to the scan this weekend, so that I can see there's actually a baby in there, as opposed to, oh, I dunno, a space alien or something. Y'know?