34 Weeks and Counting

Finally, as requested, I have posted a photo of "the bump" for all you to see. This was actually taken several weeks ago but I keep forgetting to put it up on the blog.

Yesterday we had our 34 week appointments with both the specialist and the regular doctors. At the regular doctor's office, in typical fashion, I was hooked up to the baby monitor/torture chamber and left alone in the usual discomfort. After a much shorter time than usual, the doc comes over, proclaims that the baby's monitoring is very satisfactory. I chalk this up to Ty & I finding the right chair/body positioning and adjustments of the monitors into the correct places that the staff could not seem to manage! He then proceeds to tell us that we could deliver in about 3 weeks, but being as adamant as I am that Lucanne should come into this world in her own time, this news not sit well with either myself or Ty. When asked by Ty about methods, the doc said that we could start by him manually breaking the water and wait to see what happens and if that doesn't work we could use meds to induce labor. Surprisingly c-section was not in his vocaulary at this time! Ty then asked him why we would induce labor and the doc's only response was to say that since we have worried about her this long why should we prolong the worry for the final 3 weeks. He did preface all this by saying that it really depended on what our fluid levels were doing.

I am sure some of you are asking , "Why wait for nature, when you have a doctor ready, willing and heartily able to speed things up for you?!" Well, the truth of it is this...babies know when they are supposed to come into the world. Besides, studies are now saying that labor induced by a doctor manually breaking the water tend to be more uncomfortable and are far more painful on mom; plus more medications are administered and these drugs can actually slow down the natural laboring processes. On average, induced active labor can be 3-4 times longer and harder than in a natural occuring labor. It is amazing what you can learn about when you have been on bed rest for nearly 5 months and have access to all the books Amazon and Barnes & Noble can sell you online!!

Immediately following the first appointment we went over to the hospital to see the specialist and have another high resolultion ultrasound. Right off the bat we see that Lucanne still looks to be right on target with her growth and all her organs appear to be functioning as they should. She now weighs in at 4lbs, 12ozs. I get nervous abouth the fluids, but am relieved to see that we are at 10.73cm. While this is actually lower than 2 weeks ago, it is only by 1 cm and to still be in double digits is a good sign. The specialist walks in and says she loves it when a baby proves her wrong like this!! She says we can safely consider this pregnancy a huge sucess, we should have no worries about carrying to full term, and she doesn't see any point in us continuing to go in for weekly monitoring. Both Ty and I chime in saying that our OB just advised us to induce in 3 weeks and ask her to make a point to tell him her opinions. She said it would be "ok" to deliver the baby at 37 weeks, but thought we were better off to "let her come on her own time". It is that time in pregnancy where I would normally be going in for weekly check ups and I am hopeful that we will now have some leverage to skip the weekly monitoring from here on out.

We feel it is good news all around at this time. Its playoff season for the Mammoth (LaCrosse), the Avs and the Nuggets and while they are are in good standings, we are in the home stretch and I am starting to get more and more excited to meet the little sparkplug that has been fighting against all the doctors' odds!