Monday, January 4, 2010

A Birthday Ultrasound

We went to Memorial City Hospital on December 11th which also happens to be my wife's birthday.

My wife gets very excited about her birthday and this year was no different. I woke up as she was getting out of bed and asked where she was going. She replied she was going for a shower and to get ready so I looked at the clock. It was 12.30am. We'd been in bed about 2 hours!

She got back into bed and tried to get back to sleep. She seemed to wake up every hour until 5.30am when she decided that was late enough and she was going for a shower.

I think she was excited about her birthday, but also nervous about the doctors appointment. This would be the first time we'd actually see our baby and she was worried something would be wrong.

While she was getting ready I got her birthday gifts from the other room and laid them on the bed for her to open when she came back into the bedroom.

She loved all her gifts, and we had breakfast before heading out to the hospital.

The appointment was 9am but we got there just before 8am as my wife had to go to the clinic first to take a glucose test before waiting an hour before they took her blood. The test is to see how the body reacts to the drink and to detect diabetes.

My wife asked for the orange flavour drink after a tip from a friend but it wasn't long before I could tell even that wasn't too tasty.

She did manage to drink it all down and we went to sit in the waiting room for the doctor.

After about 4 minutes, my wife very nearly revisited the drink she'd just had so I stocked up on tissues and made sure there was a bin handy incase she couldn't hold it next time.

I tried to be encouraging as she would only have to take the test again if she threw it all back up.

After about 20 minutes her stomach seemed to be settling and it got a bit easier.

About 8.50am we were called by the nurse to have the ultrasound. The person doing the ultrasound was much younger than I was expecting but I suppose that's just a sign I'm getting older!

My wife got undressed and got in position. Very quickly, and without much warning if I'm completely honest, the ultrasound thingy was in place and all of a sudden my wife's insides were displayed on a large plasma TV on the wall. The nurse/ultrasound child/scanner person pointed out the baby and turned up the volume so we could hear the heartbeat.

It was a very strong healthy heartbeat and it was pretty amazing to hear at such an early stage (6 weeks and 2 days). The baby is only 4.6cm and looks a bit like a cashew nut.


We were given a picture of the baby and went back to the waiting room to wait for the nurse practioner we'd seen last week, Mary-Helen.

While we were waiting, an hour had passed since my wife took the glucose drink so she went back to the clinic to have some blood taken.

The Nurse practioner told us everything was ok with the baby and the tests my wife had done at our last visit were ok.

She gave some more advice on eating and exercise and told us about what would happen throughout the pregnancy and the type of appointments we'd have.

The next appointment is January 14th which will be more like an MOT for my wife to make sure everything is working as it should.

They told us they would only contact us about the glucose test if something showed up. The results would be back in about a week. It's been over three weeks now and we haven't heard anything so hopefully that means everything was ok.

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