7 days to stuff my face.

So I saw my high risk doctor today and it was mostly good news.

#1- She's not going to make me suffer through the 3 hour glucose test since it's pretty likely that I'll fail. (She looked over my 1 hour results and said, "yeah, you really bombed it."  She's going to consider me to have GD and I go to the "diet class" next Thursday. Fun times. (Hence the title, 7 days to stuff my face. As far as I'm concerned, since I haven't failed the 3 hour and they haven't officially told me the rules yet, I'm going to enjoy eating till next Thursday.) She said that if when we start the diet and testing my blood sugar levels, if things seem to be normal and very easily controlled, we can always ease up on it. Sounds good to me. Right now I'm bracing myself for about 10 weeks of diet though.

#2- The best news of all, as far as I'm concerned, is that she agreed to let me cut my lovenox dose in half. Since I was 7 weeks pregnant, I've been injecting myself in the belly with blood thinner injections (aka lovenox), twice a day, at 10:30 am and 10:30 pm. I like it because I think it *has* helped, but that crap BURNS. Some people say it gets better but for me, it never really did, probably because most people are only on one dose a day and I was on two. My belly is out of places that aren't bruised. I've hit blood vessels so many times it doesn't even phase me anymore. And sometimes the places where I inject turn into a little knot that is achy all the time whenever I accidentally touch it or brush my hand against that spot. So, cutting back to just one a day makes me really happy. She was actually considering taking me off of lovenox completely now with everything so well, I halted that when I said, "No! I want to stay on it! Just not as much!" (Um, if it's helping, I don't want to stop it now and watch everything go to hell in another week or two.) Most of the people I "know", including people with real blood clotting disorders are only on 1 shot a day, 30 or 40 mg, (I don't even have a clotting disorder, I'm on lovenox mainly because they don't know why things got so bad the first time and to hopefully prevent growth restriction, so far so good on that account). So now instead of being on 60 mg a day-2 shots- I'll be on just 30 mg a day, 1 shot. At 32 weeks, I'll go off of it completely because once I make it that far they expect that I might deliver at any time and they really don't want my blood extra thin for a c-section. So hooray, only having one shot a day is a pretty big deal to me.

#3- I've only gained 9 pounds this pregnancy (as of today 25+2) and of the 9 pounds, only 1 pound in the last 2 weeks. My weight has been weird this time. I didn't really start gaining until 20 weeks and my gains have happened in big spurts that freak my high risk doctor out. Like 4 pounds since my previous visit and at my visit 2 weeks ago I had gained 4 pounds in 2 weeks. My diet really isn't changing much from week to week and neither is my activity level so I don't really have an explanation for it except it does seem like my belly goes through big spurts, some weeks where I don't think I've gotten bigger at all and some weeks when it was like, "whoa, when did this happen?" . But I'll take 9 pounds gain, for sure, especially when about 2 pounds of it is baby.

#4- She gave me the option to start seeing her every week. And guess what? I'm feeling so good about things that I actually said "eh, no thanks for now." (I see my OB next week so I really don't feel like I need to see the MFM too, since if something comes up I'd call them anyway.) So week 26 will be OB and diet class, week 27 will be high risk ob and ultrasound at the end of the week, week 28 I'm hoping to start seeing my ob every 2 weeks but if not I might ask to see high risk ob or I might just enjoy a doctor-free week, we'll see how I'm feeling then.

#5- No signs of swelling, my blood pressure was up a little but I was kind of stressed today (I thought I had lost the little photo album I've been keeping ALL of my ultrasound pictures in, so I was scrambling to re-trace my steps and trying to figure out where it might have fallen out of my purse), but my blood pressure has been normal tonight and every other day and time except this morning and afternoon, no headaches, no heartburn, no suspicious pain, and baby is moving okay.

#6- I'm not anemic. Guess that wasn't causing my dizziness. My platelet levels were great. (Since they haven't been tested since week 10 and blood thinners can sometimes lower them, that's good to know.) They did bloodwork to test my liver function today just as a precaution- I actually asked for it since I've had a twinge or two here and there. I'm 99.9% sure the twinges are just from the baby shifting around and moving and organs and ribs having to readjust...but still...they are usually on the right side. I know they are nothing like the "upper right quadrant" pain that I had with Olivia when I was sick (they usually don't even last a full minute, that pain lasted for hours and hours), but still, I'd rather have them double checked. I *could have* asked for a 24 hour urine test to make sure I'm really not spilling any protein, and she would have smiled and ordered it for me, but peeing in a jug for 24 hours is not my idea of a good time and I never spilled protein with Olivia so I don't really trust that it would mean anything anyway. My problems with Olivia were all in my liver enzymes and blood platelets, so I'm more concerned with watching those.

She asked if I've started believing we are going to have a baby, yet. And I shrugged and said sometimes and sometimes not, but told her how we have a crib, and she was happy about that. She's convinced that this baby won't die, she said she can't guarantee that we'll take him home with no NICU time, but we "won't have another death". In theory, I know that the odds are becoming overwhelmingly favorable that she's right. (Some calculators give survival odds of male, 2 pounder (907 grams), 25 weeker, with steroid shots as 90% http://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/cdbpm/pp/prog_epbo/epbo_case.cfm.) But I also know that unfortunately, babies die all the time, at all gestational ages for a lot of different reasons (and unknown reasons). I'm not sure it's even possible for me to 100% believe in this until we're strapping the baby in his car seat and driving away from the hospital.

It is good to be 25 weeks with no glaringly huge problems. The dizziness has pretty much gone away and his movement has returned to normal, I guess yesterday was a lazy day for him or a growth spurt day or who knows. This morning I did a kick count and he moved 10 times in 10 minutes and then several times during the day. My high risk ob really is not concerned about keeping track of movement yet, but I'm neurotic like that and it actually reassures me. So today was better pretty much all the way around.