34 weeks, hurray!

After an extended staycation at my parent's comfortable home (complete with nightly home-cooked meals), our follow-up testing was all negative (meaning normal) and our little family flew back across the Pacific (in business class, a nice luxury when pregnant). The first couple of weeks back, I was still cautious. My incredible employer gave me no hassles about not taking call and put me in the office just  a few hours each week. As time passes, I've gone back to my regular activities, I'm back in clinic daily, I've done a couple of births and will go back on the call schedule on a limited basis in June. With daily temperatures above 90 degrees, we have taken to near daily trips to the beach to cool off although the water often feels more like a warm bath than a refreshing cool dip. The baby moves like crazy. If he comes out skinny it is from doing his daily workouts. For the most part, I still feel like my normal self. I have yet to be afflicted by swollen ankles and the waddle that a acquired earlier has gone away as has the hip pain that accompanied it. My mom will fly out around 38 weeks to stay for 2 months; hopefully he stays in until then. In the mean time, we practice the hypnobirthing techniques that we learned in classes in the States. So now we wait, grateful for each passing week.

Holding on for one more day

It has been an eventful two weeks with this little one. Starting at 28 weeks, I randomly started contracting every two minutes. Long story short, 8 injections, 2 visits to the birthing center and one hospitalization later, I boarded a plane for a 20 hour trip to get to my parent's home for a planned (but delayed) vacation. The entire trip, I was taking terbutaline tablets, a medication used to stop contractions but with horrible side effects like heart pounding, nausea, and tremors. I trembled my way across the world so our baby could be close to a neonatal ICU that could care for him if he came early. After arriving, I weaned myself off of the terbutaline and the contractions remained far apart. As a precaution, we saw an OB/GYN here and decided to do a test that, if negative (which they almost always are) would provide huge reassurance that baby would not come in the next two weeks. Well, as luck would have it, the test came back positive giving us a 13-30% chance of meeting our baby in the next week. As one can imagine, this news was startling for me and I struggled sleeping at night knowing that a preterm birth could happen to me. But everything that could be done had been done - I had received steroid shots to protect the baby's lungs in case he came early. We had ruled out any other kind of infection that could cause contractions. So now I wait. My husband and I have decided that we will wait things out here, in the mainland US simply because the care for premature babies exceeds that available to us back in the Pacific. In a weeks time we will repeat the test and hope that it is negative and we can return back to our lives and work, reassured that our little dude is staying put for another couple of weeks. In the mean time, I'm working on a jigsaw puzzle, something I haven't done in years. I'm enjoying the oodles of fresh produce that is cheap and plentiful. I think I'm eating 8 ounces of fresh strawberries or black berries each day I'm here! And with each day that passes without major contractions, I grow more and more confident that we are going to be just fine. Little Dude just wanted a longer vacation.

27 weeks and a waddle that would make a duck jealous

It's been an ongoing annoyance from rather early on in pregnancy, dull pain at the base of my spine, my left butt cheek, actually. Over the past 2 weeks, the pain has grown worse prompting me to seek chiropractic care from multiple chiropractors. When I'm in a delivery, getting up from the bed, stool, or chair, I really have to brace myself to stand up, often accompanied by an audible groan. Getting out of bed to pee in the middle of the night, or waddle in for a birth, oh man, it's sooo painful. Rolling over in bed? Forget it. I have to choose one position an keep it all night. Now, I know what you may be thinking, I'm just getting fat and achy. I've gained just 10lbs the whole pregnancy (another issue in itself, I'm working on that one). Icing it? Done, that sacro-iliac joint is so deep it feels good to ice but doesn't get down to the joint. Icy hot? yep, did that too. And next week, I have an 18hr flight to the States to look forward to. All in all, it's a huge pain in the ass.