January 22nd, 2008 - 29 weeks

             " my 29 week belly "

We have advanced to weekly doctor appointments starting this week and today was the day. My mom has been taking me to appointments so that Mike doesn't have to take all of those days off of work. Mom and I have to be real troopers on appointment days and come prepared with snacks and good attitudes because the appointments are at least 3 or 4 hours long depending on what they want to do to me.  For today, even though I was just inpatient at the hospital 4 days ago, my doctor wanted to get a non-stress test on the babies which means that they hook me up to a contraction monitor and hook all the babies up to a heart beat monitor and they watch the babies for changes in heart rate in response to contractions and the babies' movements. They are looking for the heart rate to change by ten beats or more with movement. As I laid there, I realized that I don't entirely understand what the doctor and nurse are looking for that means we pass or fail, it looked fine to me, laugh, but I enjoyed seeing and hearing all those 

heart beats for the hour, so it was worth it. For a few minutes there it looked like we were going to fail by having a "non-reactive strip" but then the nurse poked at the babies to really wake them up and we passed by the skin of our teeth as they say. If we had failed we would have had to have an ultrasound which wasn't so bad to me except it makes for an even longer office visit day. 

In the end they decided that I didn't need one and we could wait until next week. The nurse checked my blood pressure before I left and it was 138/88 which for me is really high since I normally run in the 110's over 60's or so. She called my doctor and we had to scramble over to the doctor's office down the hall to get my weight checked and blood pressure re-checked...we just couldn't escape the doctor's office without some sort of adventure, I think they just miss my company in labor and delivery and want me to come back to them (nnnoooooo!) The nurses re-checked my blood pressure and it was 128/78 but I had a small amount of protein in my urine and I gained 7 pounds instead of my usual 1-2 pounds. So...all of these things put together bought me a trip to the lab to rule out preeclampsia which can be dangerous to me and if I were to have it then we would have to deliver the babies early for my sake. It seems to me like my body figures that it is only going to do this whole baby thing once so it might just try out all of the possibilities, I have put in a request that the rest of my pregnancy remain uneventful and that all of the preeclampsia labs turn out negative. Fingers crossed as usual...