Pregnant. Finally.

I have pre-hospital nerves. This shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. My good experiences with the doctors at the hospital can be counted on one hand and having a gentically rare condition that went undiagnosed for years doesn’t help.

Being told that you’re faking illness when you’re not, tends to lend a certain level of distrust to any further medical interactions.

It’s hard, knowing that I am going to give birth sometime soon and not entirely trusting the team that I may end up with. For the two births I’ve had, one was a disaster and one was amazing. Both of these were due to the medical team that was part of the proceedings.

I’m writing this, just to get it out of my head. If I can talk through my distrust of the entire medical system, then maybe I can get over it enough to stop stressing about going into the hospital when I go into labour. Maybe I can move past it and relax enough to let my body do what it wants to do.

I’m sure it will be okay. This is my third baby and I know what I am doing. I am also not a teenager anymore, being popped into the “naughty girl” box.

I’m sure it will be fine. I just needed to talk about it.

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Here I am, pregnant. This is today’s photo.

If I was better with photoshop, I could have fixed all of the flaws, but I’m not and I didn’t.

The question is Internet, how far along am I? 34 weeks? Or 37 weeks? No one can really decide.

But! Considering I have an entire Internet at my disposal, I thought I’d ask your opinion. For comparison, I’ve included photos of my pregnancy with Isaac.

33 weeks with Isaac.

37 weeks with Isaac.

39 weeks with Isaac.

To be honest, I feel closer to 37 weeks and the prelabour supports my theory.

If you’re so inclined, leave your best guess in the comments, as well as when you think I’ll finally deliver. Official due date is 31st August, and the recent ultrasound dates said the 6th of August. Nathan has put his money on the 2nd of August and I’m saying anywhere in the next two weeks.

The winner gets to know that they are awesome.

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Yesterday I had an antenatal doctors appointment, which was probably a good thing. I’d had bloody show the night before and early that morning, coupled with standard prelabour crampiness. Not really a huge surprise to me, given how large the baby had measured on ultrasound, regardless of dates.

It was, however, worrying to the doctor and after a quick ultrasound and head measurement (still measuring around 37 weeks), I was whisked off to the Pregnancy Assessment Centre to see if I was in labour.

I was not in labour. I knew I wasn’t in labour.

I told this to anyone who would listen to me, but apparently pregnant women might miss the fact that they’re in labour and require a machine to tell them instead. Go figure.

It wasn’t terrible, the beds in PAC are new, I had a book to read and they fed me lunch. The downside was of course that the medical staff needed to get up close and personal with my cervix, which was pronounced slightly dilated and “labour-y looking”. Those are the technical terms I’m led to believe.

More than 24 hours later, the bloody show has eased, making way for the slow loss of my mucus plug and the increasing intensity of my braxton hicks contractions.

The doctors won’t adjust my due date, despite my certainty that my dating scan was botched in the first place. Despite my retroverted uterus (which studies have shown can cause incorrect dates in ultrasounds in the first trimester). Despite the fact that there is no good reason for my baby to be measuring 37 weeks, except for the probable chance that she is actually more cooked than they want to believe.

This seems silly to me, as they panic and treat me like a preterm labour risk, when I’m pretty sure this is just regular prelabour and that I’ll birth a perfectly healthy term baby.

And yes, I know that ultrasounds can be incorrect. I know that they are often wrong and no, I’m not panicking about the fact that she is “big for dates”. You don’t need to reassure me of these things. I trust my body to birth this baby when we are both ready, regardless of size.

I’m just frustrated at the doctors inability to listen to what I am saying. Funnily enough, I am the one who inhabits my body and I am in the unique position of being the only one who knows exactly what my body is saying.

Strange how that works, isn’t it?

Either way, despite ultrasounds and dates, this baby will be here when she is ready, and we are now after a little bit of panicking, ready for her arrival.

Which is nice, really.

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If you’re a long time reader, you’ll know that I don’t grow big babies. Isaac was perfectly sized and born at 7lbs, but they spent a bit of time worrying that he was “small for dates”. The same thing happened with Amy, and we were told to expect a 5lb baby – only she was perfectly sized by the time she was born too, a lovely 7lb6oz.

The defining thing here is that the babies I grow, while a great size for me, measure small against the percentile charts. Both children have measured anywhere between 2 and 6 weeks behind for my pregnancies.

So you can imagine my slight bafflement when this baby measured around 10 days ahead of dates at my 20 week scan. No matter I thought, she’ll be here when she’s here.

However.

I had a growth scan today, booked during my 12 week appointment, due to a sub-chorionic haemorrhage and my previous history of small-for-dates babies. They just wanted to check that everything was going well and that she was nicely gestating away.

Imagine my shock when we discovered that at apparently 33 weeks, my daughter is measuring 37 weeks at her head and 36.3 weeks on average. Her estimated weight is just a little under what Isaac was when he was born.

I do not grow big babies.

Not at all.

Not in the slightest.

Nor do I have gestational diabetes and the constant nausea has meant that my diet is super healthy too. My total weight gain is 2.5kg so far (I did lose 5 kg in the first trimester though and have gained that back).

If you’re new here, I had a miscarriage before falling pregnant with this baby. In fact, I was pregnant again so quickly that there is doubt that I miscarried the entire pregnancy. I had blood tests done afterwards, but only to confirm that my HCG levels were dropping, not that they’d gone to zero – and the ultrasound I had done, she freely admitted that my uterus was too full of blood to see much of anything.

For the actual miscarriage, I didn’t bleed for very long, or very heavily. My periods were worse, and hurt more too, which confused me a bit – I expected the bleeding from a miscarriage to be heavier than a normal period. Then I experienced early pregnancy symptoms 10 days later, with a positive pregnancy test soon thereafter.

So, there is now a lot of confusion about my early dates. I’ve been pretty convinced that I’m further along than the doctors believe I am – based solely on how I felt in the very early weeks and when I got a positive test, plus how I measured at midwifery appointments.

I have a follow-up appointment at the High Risk Clinic on Wednesday, at which I expect to have to explain myself repeatedly and refuse to be booked in for a Caesarean.

In the meantime, I am having a minor panic about the fact that we now expect this baby relatively soon and that I have very little time to Get Things Ready.

Suddenly, the prelabour symptoms I’ve been having this past week don’t seem quite so ridiculously early.

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