Prenatal Visit - 16 weeks

My doctor visit was relatively uneventful today. Baby's heart rate was 150-something, I haven't gained enough weight to be classified as a blimp yet, the doctor said I can keep riding my bike, and everything is pretty much ok.

My blood pressure was a little high today, but we're not worried about it yet. I've been checking it at home, and it's been consistently much lower than the reading in the office today (and we've already compared my cuff's reading to the nurse's measurement, so we know my cuff is accurate). It could have been high for any number of reasons today - hurrying out of the house to go to the appointment, traffic, the parking garage (that was the nurse's suggestion, lol!), trying to keep Lily occupied during the visit, who knows? And besides that, it wasn't THAT high - 140/80 is certainly not unheard of for me. They took it again before I left, and it was 134/80. My nurse will call me on Friday to find out how it's been this week, and we'll go from there.

We did another blood test today. You may have heard of the quad screen; we did just one part of the screening because we already did the nuchal translucency test. I'll let you know the results. We scheduled my "big" ultrasound for four weeks from today. I'll be 20 weeks, so we should definitely be able to find out the sex of the baby at that time. I see my doctors again in two weeks, just because she'll miss me if I don't visit often enough. Well, that and they want to take my blood pressure.

I found out for sure that if I make it far enough to be able to schedule my c-section, my own doctors will for sure be doing my surgery. If something happens and we have to deliver early, my own doctors will do it as long as they're in town, even if it's the middle of the night. If for some reason both of my doctors (Dr. Mastrobattista who is my attending physician, and Dr. Holland who is my fellow -- I see both of them at all of my prenatal appointments) are out of town, one of the other attending physicians will do my surgery. Most of the time at least one of my doctors will be available, if not both. That's good to know. I wasn't sure how it worked when you're already a patient of these doctors; it was a little different when Lily was born.

Oh, and about scheduling the c-section... No, we aren't going to set a tentative date or anything like that for a long time. When I'm 36 weeks we'll decide whether we want to do the amniocentesis or not. If we do the amnio at 36 weeks and find out the baby's lungs are mature, we deliver the baby right away. If we decline the amnio, the baby will be delivered at 37 weeks, regardless of lung maturity or any other factors. The reasoning for delivering early is twofold: they don't want me going into labor and causing my uterus to rupture (my classical cesarean causes my uterus to be weaker than a more common transverse incision - my incision cut the uterus across the muscle instead of with the muscle, so it will never heal up as well; they had to do a classical incision because my uterus was too small at 24 weeks for a transverse); also, they don't want me to develop preeclampsia suddenly at the end of the pregnancy and have it be dangerous for me and the baby. As sick as I was at 24 weeks, they just don't want to take any chances later in the pregnancy when preeclampsia is more common.

So that was the doctor visit... Nothing too exciting, really. We talked about a lot of stuff, but most of it I already knew. My 'morning sickness' is finally getting better. It's been a whole week since I threw up last, and I've been feeling a little better overall. Still get tired easily, but I'm not always sluggish anymore.