38 Weeks

As things are starting to wind down into the final weeks the news just keeps getting better and better!

Yesterday we had our final visit to the specialists and got to see Lucanne for the final time in ultrasound. The sonographer was able to point out that Lucanne currently has a full head of hair and it is actually quite long at this time. This comes as some surprise to me since my own hair was so fine and light that you couldn't really see it at all until I was 2!!! Lucanne was measured and while this is the first time she didn't meet the average sizing for her "age" she still weighed in at 6lbs 8 ozs!! The doctor figures that she could easily be a 7 1/2 pounder by birth if she keeps growing the way she is now. This pretty amazing seeing how things started for us and how just a few months ago the fear of losing her or having her prematurely was a high probability. The fluids went up this time to over 11cm and that seemed to surprise everyone since it should actually be going down now, not up, but we'll take it.

We also had our weekly visit to the OB yesterday and he is now thinking that she is staying put; he even joked that she may not come until August now. He tries, but he really isn't funny at all!!! We have no signs of dilation still so I still predict she will be a week late and I am perfectly happy to have her come whenever she is ready!!

Work is progressing on getting the house ready for a baby, but I know that I will not be done on time, no matter how many hands I have helping me out. I have resigned myself to not having the nursery painted and seeing as how the crib and baby furniture isn't even expected for another 5-7 weeks I am OK with it all. Still, on many days I have to remind myself that it isn't as important to have it all done before she comes because she won't care what her space looks like for a long while!

Meanwhile, I am glad to say that it seems like Winter has finally left us...at least this week! While we had around 8 inches of snow just last Wednesday, this weekend it warmed up enough to feel like Summer is barreling its way full speed towards us. We are expecting rain this week and over the holiday weekend, so maybe we will see something that resembles Spring yet...only time will tell. I have to admit that even though my body doesn't care much for the heat, I am definitely glad to be rid of the white stuff this year! Being on bed rest and having nothing much better to do than watch the snow fall can be as depressing as Seattle in the grayest of times. :~D (Still, I'm glad I will not to have to go through the worst of the summer heat pregnant and without air conditioning, that is for sure!)

Oh, and if the Penguins sweep Detroit in the Stanley Cup Finals Lucanne may end up with the middle name Sidney (after "Super Sidney Crosby" for those of you who don't follow the game)!! GO PENS!!

37 Weeks

This week we had just one appointment and that was just to check our status. We still have no dilation and very, very little effacement, but that Lucanne's head has moved down just a little further into place. The OB thinks now it may take a few weeks to get there, but he warned that it could happen very suddenly and not take any time at all. The excitement is mounting!! As is my need to nest!

Week 36...almost there!

We are officially at 36 weeks and getting excited now! Yesterday we had our double duty appointments and everything is going along just great!

First, we went to the regular doctor who has finally decided that the non-stress tests will not show us anything useful and has agreed to stop putting me into the torture chair weekly. I still need to get a photo of the chair to show you all what I am talking about when I whine about a 30 year old device that is designed to make mom so uncomfortable that she might just forget her daily pregnancy woes to the backache caused by sitting in this device! We had a basic exam which showed exactly what I expected...this baby isn't ready yet and isn't isn't going to be forced into the world any sooner than she wants to come! The baby hasn't "dropped" yet and I am not dilated or effaced in any way. She is still an active little bugger and even kicked the doctor when he was trying to push her into a position he wanted her in to listen to her heart rate. (That's MY girl!) She also had the hiccups...something that happens now 3-4 times a day...while he was listening, which made him laugh. So while we are still going to have weekly appointments with the doctor she is taking her time and enjoying life right where she is...much to the doctor's chagrin, I suspect!

Next, we headed over to the hospital for our bi-weekly sonogram. The sonographer was one we hadn't seen before and didn't care much for. I'm sure some of you have heard about the newest trend in ultrasounds, the 3D picture. It is supposed to let you see what your baby is going to look like and has a fairly high rate of accuracy in visuals. If you want to know what her face is going to look like you can use this technology to get a good idea. Well, we knew from talking with our normal sonographer that you cannot see a thing with this technology if you don't have a lot of fluids in front of the baby's face or if you have an anterior placenta. Our sonographer, without asking us if we were interested in this and in a huge waste of our insurance company's money, just plops us into 3D mode and tries to look at the baby's face. Well, we knew it wouldn't work, but we still ended up with a picture of a sepia toned blob that we were told we could use our imaginations to see the features!! What a waste of time, I only hope we don't get billed for the wasted resource because those can run anywhere up to $5,000!! So the specialist finally shows up and it turns out not to be the one we usually see...I had no idea there were 11 doctors in their practice that we could see at any give time regardless of who we schedule with! This one I liked well enough, despite the annoying habit she had of talking so quietly that no one around her could hear what she was saying! This gal actually took the time to read our charts in front of us from cover to cover (like a good doctor should) before sitting down to look at the baby. I cannot tell you the surprise she gave us when she read a note from the other doctor saying we were supposed to get an amniocentesis and possibly have an induction of labor next week!!! WOW! Talk about your shockers! Here our doctor just two weeks ago said she didn't agree with the talk of induction because of how well Lucanne was doing, but then apparently notates that we should have an amnio and induction without ever discussing either with us?! Again, I say WOW! Not only was this not discussed with us, but we never would agree to doing an amnio unless there were some reason for it and we had no indication that one was ever intended, let alone needed. This really makes enforces my theory that these doctors up here are only interested in forcing a birth so they get their way and don't have to do any unscheduled births. I don't care if I have to give birth in the car on the way to the hospital, I am not letting any doctor take unnecessary medical action to make it easier on them and to get to charge 20-30% more in the process! So finally the doc sits down and looks at the baby. She says we are normal in every way (except the fluids, of course) then spends a good 15 minutes looking at various Dopplers. Yes, that is Dopplers, as in what you hear on the evening weather reports. The Doppler in a sonogram allows the doctor to see and hear the pulsing of the blood through the arteries and flow back through the veins. We got to not only experience the Dopplers within our girl, but also in the umbilical cord back out to me! Pretty cool, and yes, on the sonogram it looks just like the red and blue weather Dopplers on the news! Again, everything is going well and all news seems to be good news with this kiddo.

I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone again for their love and support. We could not have made it easily through these 4+ months and we are so grateful that every one of you is a part of our lives. I'd also like to again thank Uncle Kevin & Aunt Kim for their gracious lending of the cradle, "Nonnie" Kelly for the Dragonfly crib bedding and a great BIG thank you to Aunt Lane for the recently received remaining coordinating Dragonfly items. I have already loaded the diaper stacker with newborn diapers in anticipation of Lucanne's imminent arrival and I look forward to actually getting the nursery put together soon. Now that bed rest restrictions are a little lighter I am working my way back to sanity by cleaning and nesting as much as I can take. A couple of hours a day is about all I can take at a time, but boy do I feel accomplished by the end of that day! I am hoping to start painting with eco-friendly, stink free paint in the next few weeks.

I'd like to do a friends and family pool of when Lucanne will arrive. I've personally think she will arrive June 7th...what is your guess?

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!

32 Weeks...only 8 more to go!!!

I apologize to all of you who were waiting to hear what has been happening with the pregnancy! I've been slacking on my blogging duties in order to take care of things that needed to be done in March. In the weeks since my last blog I've been relegated to returning to the specialist every 2 weeks for fluid measurements and weekly visits to the OB for baby monitoring. The monitoring is still just plain awful. My visit two weeks ago consisted of 45 minutes in the torture chair with a brief 20 second pop in of the doctor. In that 20 seconds he said that the pain I have been feeling whenever I move my left leg for the last several weeks could be a strain, sprain, dislocation or broken bones in my tailbone. Nothing to be done in any case but suffer through the pain and hope it gets better. It isn't uncommon for a baby's position to cause problems in the "S.I. Joint". And baby, let me tell you it isn't fun! That visit also didn't provide good test results, whether that meant that things looked bad on the results or that the results just didn't come out clear enough to make the doctor happy I still don't know. The week before that, at 30 weeks, we went to see the specialist and he had bad news. We dropped from 11 cm to 8 cm of fluid and they were starting to worry again.

Needless to say, little Lucanne had something more to prove to the doctors at 32 weeks! When we went in on Monday for our 32 week visit to the OB she kicked and bucked and probably would have hollered and screamed if she could be heard and the readings were more to the doc's liking. Minutes after leaving the doc's office she had more to say to the specialist! She had an increase of fluids to almost 12 cm and we were able to see her taking "practice" breaths on the ultrasound. It is such an amazing thing to watch that little lung expand and contract inside your own body. I have to admit that while all this bed rest has been a pain, both literally and figuratively, it has been well worth it to see the things we have seen in the ultrasounds!! We have seen the brain, all 4 chambers of the heart beating, the kidneys, the liver, and now have gotten to see the lungs actually working!!! I cannot begin to tell you all how that makes me feel. I had been worried about the fluids for two weeks and almost dreading going to see the specialist as much as the monitoring torture chamber at the OB's office. Our little miracle girl is proving to be such a fighter and I just know that despite all the OB's concerns about this, that, and the other thing, Lucanne will prove him wrong and we will make it all the way through to term without having to have a surgical delivery. My friend said today that karmic-ly I am on my way to an easy and swift delivery and easy first few months after all that I have been through with this pregnancy. I sure hope she is right!


Several people have been asking me about the baby's room and colors. We received a wonderful dragonfly crib bedding set from Herb & Kelly. We are still planning on painting the room in a Camelot Castle theme, but are adding the dragonflies to the design because castles were so hard to find where they didn't look like Disney cakes! (The crib bedding is cream with chocolate brown stripes and dots and light granny smith apple dragonfly bodies.)

Kevin & Kim have loaned us the bassinet that Kevin made when Hailey was born (and their Winnie the Pooh bedding set). We will be using the bassinet for at least the first few months so I won't have to run downstairs every 2 hours!

People are also asking about registries already. We are registered at www.jcpenny.com and www.babiesrus.com.

We are anxiously counting down to June 1 and pray that we have enough ticks left in the clock to prepare ourselves and the house for the coming of our little miracle baby. In the meantime I will try to be more diligent about updating the blog!! As always thanks to every one's support and good will!!!

Week 28

So yesterday we had an appointment with my regular OB doctor. I drank 6 ounces of what tasted like a flat cola but had the punch of a full pot of coffee after not having much sugar over the last 6 months. This vile liquid was for the gestational diabetes blood test that takes them a mere 6 seconds to do...but the sugar lasts for hours, and hours, and hours!!!

First, I must say that in typical healthcare fashion, we are made to wait for what seems like 20-30 minutes (after blood is drawn for the diabetes test) before we even hear the doctor's voice. When we do finally hear his voice in the hall we hear him say that he wants to do an ultrasound on me. The nurse's aid comes in and I emphatically tell her that we just had an ultrasound at the specialist's two weeks ago and don't understand why this doc would want to do another one when that doc said no more for a month. AND we were only scheduled to do a glucose test and a non-stress test. Of course she hasn't a clue, but more on that later...after several more minutes the doc comes in and moves us over to the non-stress test chair area not mentioning that he didn't remember why he asked us to schedule this appointment in the first place.

I am then told to sit in this torture device to have a baby monitor strapped to my belly by the world's most inept nurse's aid. This chair they put me in reminded me a bit of a dentist's chair, as it reclined backwards just enough to make me severly uncomfortable, but instead of a leg platform to elevate your legs this one had these leg braces placed at uncomfortable angles just like the stir-ups on the doctor's exam table. Add a lumpy pillow at my lumbar to push the belly outwards and the overly tight straps that are supposed to "hold" the monitors in place, if the nurse's aid had the slightest clue, and you have one very uncomfortable pregnant woman who just wants to poke the nurse's aid in the eye, run a marathon and/or jump over multiple story buildings from the excess sugar in her system! So here I am pushing the heart rate monitor into my belly with one hand while holding a plastic baton, similar to a nurse's call button on hospital bed, in the other hand with the expectation that I press this every time I feel the baby move and the nurse's aid has the audacity to ask me if I want a juice to help "activate" the baby some. What this uber-twit failed to tell me was that this was a fruit juice, with an additional 24 grams of sugar, not some medical miracle that stimulates a baby's movement for this test!!! (But, hey, she did say she actually saw my belly move with a kick from the baby.) All the while sitting in the corner of a dead-end hallway with just a flimsy cloth screen to block out the view from passers-by, my belly exposed with smears of blue goo from where she slid the monitor across (up and down, from side to side, trying to find the baby's heartbeat) rapidly cooling in the open air, listening to the chatter of the incredibly ignorant employees yucking it up and talking about the other patients and acting ridiculously unprofessional. Feeling terribly frightened that the future of our world lies in the medical hands of kids like the girls hired to work in my doctor's office.

All the while Ty is sitting in a chair next to me wondering why the doctor would say that he disagreed with the specialist's theory of "alls well that looks well" in the ultrasounds, and is now implying that these non-stress tests will show more than the all high resolution ultrasounds we have been subjected to for the last 2 1/2 months! He says the heart rate measured against the movement monitor will tell us more about the baby's condition and now he wants to have us do this WEEKLY because while these tests are so telling, they are really only good for telling a story of about one week at a time!!!!!

The doc comes back after 20-25 minutes of what amounts to pure mental and physical agony for me and says the measurements are positive and that we appear to even be getting the desired increase of 10-15 beats in heart rate when the baby moves (I can see with my own eyes that it isn't every time she moves, but he doesn't say this to us). So they send us on our merry little way and Ty heads out to work while I try to figure out how to counter the sugar high I am feeling...something not easily accomplished as I have now injested over 75 grams of sugar substances in a 2 hour period.

I try to counteract the sugar with a high dose of protein, but that just makes the baby kick, jump and move all around like a super athelete in my belly. I try going to the store to burn off the sugar and get a bit of shopping done, but that just makes my feet tired and my back ache even more than it did earlier in the torture chair. I try to crash on the couch hoping that the sugar will eventually wear off and I will go into the obligatory coma after ingesting so much sugar, but all that happens is that I feel edgy and annoyed from inactivity and the baby continues to do ballet twists and hockey splits all at once! The baby never did quiet down and I lay awake feeling the miraculous movements I had only guessed before to be baby movements, until well after midnight.

The good that came of this appointment...I can honestly say that Baby Lucanne is officially freed of whatever restraints she had previously for movements. She is still as active today as she was last night. And we did find out that she is still doing what she is supposed to do by having the increase in heart rate when she moves (this officially means that her neurological functions are appearing to be increasing as normal).

Of the bad that we came to realize with this appointment...our doctor hires complete morons to work in his office, doesn't have a clue what he is scheduling appointments for and obviously doesn't read his notes or charts prior to seeing his patients. He continues to give us the worse case scenario treatment and we are now feeling that he is doing a lot of covering his butt for any potential mishap that could befall our little princess. We definitely feel like his goal is more to keep us (as fairly well informed parents-to-be/medically trained professionals) from suing him for medical malpractice by making us come to town so often and implying that nothing is as good an indicator as whatever next step he has in store for us. And we experienced first hand the fact that "No Child Left Behind" meant only that we will continue to push uneducated morons out of the school system without them ever learning how to be anything more than moronic teen-twits well into their 20's.

We are both more than just a bit annoyed, but as I told Ty yesterday I will allow him two more non-stress tests until I see the specialist at the end of the month. If at that time all still seems to be progressing well, I will suggest to the OB that these non-stress tests feel like a waste of time for me and if he isn't seeing any negative changes that I will not continue to come down every week just for his whimsy. While I do enjoy seeing and hearing my baby I am willing to wait until she has decided to join the world at large rather than continue to line the doctor's pockets!

26 Weks!

Today marks 26 weeks...only 14 more to go!

Today also marks the best news we have had in a while with this pregnancy! We had both our regular 6 month appointment and another appointment with the specialist this morning. We were supposed to hit the regular appointment and then head over to the hospital for the specialist, but my doc had an emergency and had to reschedule for later today...hence me not starting this until nearly 4pm on Wednesday! We had a wonderful, leisurely breakfast at a diner downtown and then headed over to see the specialist. The ultrasound showed that the baby is still growing well and is still right on target for her size measurements. And best of all it showed that the fluids increased again! We increased by 2 centimeters this time, not as much as I was hoping for, but still a good increase. The technician says the normal range is between 8cm and 20cm, but the doc says normal is 15. On one and a half months of bed rest we have increased from 6.2 to 11.5 and that was enough encouragement for the doc to say that we don't need to keep coming in every two weeks. He thinks the progress is indicative of a positive future and now we only have to go to the specialist once a month!!! This guy also gave me permission to do some exercises to stretch (yoga exercises) out so I won't be as sore and even gave me permission to drive myself to the pool so that I can do a full immersion soak 2-3 times a week (basically just keeping the bulging belly underwater because the tub isn't nearly deep enough to cover this thing!). I cannot tell you how excited I am to be able to get out of the house a for a couple of hours a week! Whoo hooo!!!

After that appointment we headed over to my office to pick up my personal belongings. I'm pretty much over my frustration on how my office manager called up last week basically telling me I was terminated, without using the words fired, or termination. However, I do have a problem with the way the whole thing was handled on their end and I cannot begin to tell you just how livid Ty has been over this. So we picked up my stuff and and headed for our second appointment.

It was actually better seeing my regular doc after having seen the specialist. Good news is better to have before you get not so good news. My OB wants to continue seeing me every 2 weeks so he can do non-stress tests on the baby. Basically what this amounts to is me sitting in his office for a 1/2 hour every two weeks with a fetal monitor strapped to my belly. He wants to get info on what the baby is doing and how much she is moving. I still don't feel a whole lot of movement with her, and a lot of the time I am not sure if it is her moving or gas bubbles in my intestines. I think what I feel is her, but he is worried that the smaller amounts of fluid may make it harder for her to pull a good enough punch to feel it on the outside and he just wants to make sure that she is moving. It's all just precautionary and I don't feel that there is a thing wrong with her. I am bummed that I have to go down there every 2 weeks still, but I will do whatever is required. Everything I had concerns about the two docs dismissed as normal and said not to worry. They said I should be expecting to get more tired, more easily, and to expect other changes, physical as well as emotional. So I will keep up the bed rest, but add in some yoga and some pool time and maybe just a little cleaning around the house (if I can get away with it).

So that is the Indian Hills News for now. I am off to find a maternity bathing suit so I can get to the pool as soon as possible!! Oh, and thanks to everyone who comments on the blog. I read them all and I do appreciate hearing from you all!!