Thursday, December 8, 2011

10 Week OB Visit

Wednesday was my appointment for my weekly shot. I was 10 weeks, so I was curious to see if Marie was going to try to find the heartbeat. She looked for it at 10 weeks with Lorelai, so I had a feeling she might. Last week, Marie was completely booked, so I had to see another doctor. I wasn’t crazy happy about it, but I needed my shot, so I didn’t really have a choice. I asked him if he thought Marie might look for it the next week, and he very rudely said no. Overall, he wasn’t great with me, but I do kind of understand. He doesn’t “know” me or my history or anything, so he just treated me like a regular patient. Not that I feel like I deserve special treatment, but I just felt he could have worded things differently to someone who has lost a baby and is trying to survive the first trimester of a new pregnancy.


Anyway, I had Matt come with me to my appointment Wednesday just in case Marie decided to look. We decided to not take LL yet, because we’d rather wait until we’ve heard it and are extremely confident that everything is okay. Having lived through being a doctor’s appointment where you get the worst news possible, I don’t want to chance having my daughter there for something like that.


I don’t know what was going on, but they were CRAZY BUSY there Wednesday. My appointment was at 3:30. I signed in a the front desk at 3:13. About 3:40 they took me back to the second waiting room. The entire room was full except for one seat! I took the only empty one available! I talked to a friend about it at school today, and she said they’re buys because people are trying to fit in all of their appointments before the end of the year because they’ve met their deductable and everything will roll back over in January. Totally makes sense!


They called me back to do my weight, urine, vitals, etc. Their scale said that I was down 1 pound from my pre-pregnancy weight. Awesome! I sure don’t look it, but I’ll take it! My blood pressure was a little high for me (136/70), but still in the normal range. My pulse was also up (around 100), and Matt said it could have been the stress from having to wait so long. I have no idea. Sometimes my pulse is just randomly high??


I FINALLY got back to a room at about 4:30. It was right at an hour past my scheduled appointment time! Once Matt got back there with me, we still have to wait a good 10-15 minutes before Marie came in. She came in with the Doppler, so I immediately knew that she was going to try and look for the heartbeat. Yay!! I really had been a little nervous because I know that 10 weeks is like the earliest that you can find it on the Doppler. I also know that it’s not crazy uncommon for doctors to not be able to find it at this appointment. I was torn because I wanted her to try and find it because I desperately wanted to hear it. But I was nervous for her to find it because how would I feel if she couldn’t?? I had finally decided that it was better to just try because if something was wrong, I’d rather find out now than 2 weeks from now. That would just be 2 weeks harder, ya know?


Well, she started to look for it, but could only pick up my heartbeat. She looked, and squished my tummy, and moved it around, and kept trying and trying. And couldn’t find it. She probably looked for a good 5 minutes, but all we could hear was my heartbeat. What was shocking to me was that I never really got nervous about it. I guess I had prepared myself mentally that it was possible that she wouldn’t find it this early. After about 5 minutes, she gave up. Then she said the best words possible, “Well, let’s go ahead and do an ultrasound to see what’s going on in there, or else none of us are going to get any sleep tonight.” And this is why I love her!


This is the point where she did say that it was possible that my uterus was titled. This was also the point where I told her that Dr. Swindle told me after my D&C that I did have a tilted uterus. She said that hers was tilted too, and it wasn’t a big deal. By this time, it was almost 5:00, so they got us to the ultrasound room pretty quickly. I was fully expecting for this NOT to be an abdominal ultrasound, but to be…well…the other kind. So I handed Matt my stuff and stood by the bathroom door. When she told me I could go ahead and lay down, I was like, “Um…..”. That’s when she said that she was going to do an abdominal one. A relief to me!! Honestly, I still wasn’t even nervous at this point. I just had such a peace!


As soon as she put the wand on my tummy, I could tell that the baby had grown SO MUCH! My first thought was (and this is kind of sad) that even if we had lost the baby, and least I would know that it had grown a good bit and had done better than the last one. It was probably Satan, for sure, but it’s honestly what I thought. Then she really started moving the wand and I knew instantly that everything was okay. Matt and I were so shocked because we were actually looking at a BABY! Three weeks ago, the baby looked like a little toothpick. Wednesday, it was a baby!! We could see the head, body, arms and legs!! It was honestly the cutest thing ever!! We didn’t get to listen to the heartbeat as this was more of an “emergency” ultrasound, but we did see it in there beating away. And she measured the heart rate, and it was a very strong 176bpm! She was SUPER nice and let us stay in there just a minute longer to see the baby.


She moved all around so we could see him/her really good. I said something like, “It sure doesn’t look like there is a lot of room in there!” so she moved around and showed us how there actually was a lot of empty room in the uterus, you just couldn’t see it when she focused on the baby. While the little heart was in there beating away, the baby was being SUPER still. She jiggled my belly a good bit to see if we could wake the baby up, but he/she just kept sleeping away. Maybe we’ll have a good sleeper on our hands! It was just such a sweet time that Matt and I both started crying. Not boo-hoo’ing or anything, but just sweet tears of joy. That little baby- our little miracle from God- was just so perfect in there! She was super nice to leave a picture on the screen for us while she got my chart ready, and I really appreciated that she printed out some pictures for us.


So for the first time, here’s a picture of Baby Mullican looking like an actual baby! Isn’t he/she adorable?!




So what started as a stressful appointment ended up being such a GOOD appointment and Matt and I both left just feeling on top of the world! I know that I’m not out of the woods yet (2 more weeks!), but I just felt like my chances of having everything turn out okay just go SO MUCH BETTER after seeing how great the baby is doing! I go back for another shot next Friday, but I have no idea if she’ll try and find the heartbeat again. And I have no idea how long it’ll take for the baby to be big enough for us to hear on the Doppler, despite a tilted uterus. But I’m SO thankful for the gift we got Wednesday of seeing our precious baby!!


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3 comments:

Joeylee said...

Aww so glad you were able to see the baby. Glad to hear everything is going good. Do you have boy/girl names picked out?

Emily said...

Sorry! I feel bad i wasnt more pumped for u! I mean i guess i have a valid reason but still! This was SUCH a big exciting day for u!!!!!!! ;)

Robyn said...

Joeylee - Yes! We do have names picked out! But we haven't decided yet if we're going to tell people, so for now they're still a secret. But you know as soon as we decide, I'll be blogging about it. :)

Em - Um - I think you had a VERY valid excuse! I actually felt bad even bringing it up when we were there because I didn't know if it was inappropriate. We for sure didn't want to steal your thunder. We were just so excited that we couldn't keep it in!