All is generally good here at 18w6d. Baby continues to have a normal heartbeat, and is rumbling around so much I haven’t been scared that there won’t be a heartbeat at my weekly appointment. I actually felt him kick (or punch??) from the outside the other day! All of my labs have been coming back normal. (Although we’re still waiting on the genetic carrier results from the fragile X and spinal muscular atrophy blood tests.)
My massive online orders of maternity clothes were finally delivered this week, and with great trepidation I started cutting off tags of a few things so I have something to wear. (I’m planning on leaving the tags on most of the things I want to keep until after my “20 week” (really 19 ½) appointment next Monday.) My belly is getting harder and harder to hide, and I’m running out of energy to try. I saw a good friend the other day and told her I was pregnant, only to have her say “I was wondering….” This is the first time the tummy has given me away!! I think it’s going to look less like too much cheese and more like too little baby in another couple of weeks. For now, I just look like a person with skinny arms and legs and a beer gut. Hawt!
I’m not super stressed out about the 20 week appointment next week—the high risk OB told us after our 15 ½ week appointment that everything look great and she would be really surprised if they caught something new on the 20 week. That being said, I am still a little nervous. It’s particularly unfortunate that hubby can’t make this one—he has an out of town meeting. Boo.
What’s really keeping me up at night, though, is worrying about all of the things that could be wrong that they can’t or won’t find until baby is born. Did you know that there are more than 4,000 different kinds of birth defects, and that around 3% of babies are born with some kind of birth defect, and that up to 70% of birth defects are undiagnosed?? AND, let’s not forget that the risk of birth defects rises with recurrent miscarriages (it doubles: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/8290380/), and it increases with a history of birth defects, and it increases with age of parents (although I read that while that is definitely true for chromosomal defects, it may not be true for all defects: https://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20140203/babies-born-to-moms-over-35-may-have-lower-risk-for-certain-birth-defects#1). So I feel like our risks are pretty much sky high. That’s not a great feeling.
Of course, we’re under a microscope and going to an awesome clinic, so we would expect a much higher detection rate than average. And a lot of the super common and devastating ones (anencephaly, spina bifida, trisomy 13/18/21, structural brain defects, structural heart defects, structural kidney defects, limb defects, clubfoot, etc.) either have been ruled out or should for the most part be ruled out at the appointment next week. AND some birth defects are relatively harmless. (In fact, I was born with an abdominal hernia—a birth defect. After a nail-biting [for my parents] surgery when I was a month old, I’ve had no issues.) I mean, do I want my baby to have a hernia or cleft pallet or even tracheoesophageal fistula/esophageal atresia (what my niece was born with)? No, of course not. But those are generally fixable and have no super long-term issues. I continue to worry that baby will be born with something profoundly wrong. For now, all I can do is… oh, wait, I can’t do anything.
The other night I dreamed that someone told me that if I walked on broken glass it would help my baby. So of course I chose to walk on broken glass. (And it wasn’t like the thick broken glass of a dish. It was super sharp like a broken light bulb or holiday ornament.) When I woke up, I was at the part of my dream where I was pulling out bloody two-inch shards of glass from my feet. And then I made the mistake of googling the meaning of walking on broken glass while pregnant. Apparently it’s a bad sign. Whatever. I didn’t need to search out the meaning of my dream online to know what it means—I would do just about anything for this ~6in ~8oz little fella I’ve never even met yet. (And it might be a throwback to all of the shit I was willing to do when we were trying to have kids with fertility treatments.)
My husband has started to get on my case about continuing to say “if” this works. WHEN he says, WHEN. When will I feel the same way? I’m not sure, but not now. And probably not for a while.
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