I'm Carrying What?

Things have gotten a little interesting in soon-to-be-a-mother-land as I'm currently carrying a 9 pound, 5 ounce baby (weight as of yesterday afternoon). At first this was something that was just interesting, but now it's gotten a little stressful when my doctor told me that the baby is almost too big for a natural birth and I might have to have a cesarean, but because I'm a tall, large woman, I might be able to pull this off. Unfortunately, this was the appointment in which I could've used my husband's support (he opted to stay home), so when I was asked what I wanted to do, I almost lost it. How do I make a decision on whether to go for natural or surgery [and I use "natural" in the sense of pathway of delivery and not in the no-epidural context]? I told my doctor that I wanted to wait a week to try to have the baby, so I'm going to be scheduled to be induced next Wednesday night.

My doctor is hopeful that I will come in for my morning appointment dilated 3 centimeters so that they won't have to induce, but seeing as I'm almost 2 centimeters and not effaced, I'm worried that I will have to go the surgery route. I've never been in the hospital for more than a few hours at a time in the emergency room for asthma attacks, so this baby will be the first time I've had a major procedure, and now I'm starting to get scared. What if I can't have the baby naturally? What if we start that way but it gets stuck at the shoulders (which my doctor says is the fear when the baby is too big)? I know that a cesarean is not a mark of failure (considering how many people in my family have had them), but I still feel bad if I have to do that. And surgery will take longer for me to recover from, making going back to school even more difficult. And for all I know, the ultrasound could be wrong and the baby is smaller than it says (or it could be larger), but I won't know until delivery day.

Now the problem is, if I have the baby early [The original due date was today, but was changed to September 6] I will stop working sooner than I wanted and that will put us in a bad financial fix. If I manage to get all the way to Wednesday, the baby may be too big and I would have to have the surgery. Or I could go into labor over the weekend and end up with someone other than my primary doctor doing the delivery. Anyway out, I don't win.

I'm trying to stay calm about this, but it's hard to not feel bad that this isn't going in a way that makes sense to me. I had no plans for how I wanted this to go, I had just hoped I'd be the first in my family since my great-grandmother to have a natural birth and that may not happen. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm carrying a baby that's approaching 10 pounds. We'll have to see how this goes.

By the way

I haven't given an update on the baby front, and I think I should since my due date has changed since my last post on the matter.

I went in to get a Quad screening done on March 26th where they try to determine if there are abnormalities in the child's development (e.g. Down's syndrome). They say that only 1% of the people who get an abnormal reading ever actually have a problem, but it's not much of a comfort when you get a call letting you know that you've got a potential problem. My doctor's office called my office phone four times before they reached me and said "I don't mean to alarm you, but..." we had an abnormality in our Quad screen. You don't mean to alarm me, but you called my office four times in one hour and then tell me that I need to come in the very next day for an ultrasound? Let's just say that this blew my whole day. I ended up having the ultrasound done on Friday morning because I had a dentist appointment that Thursday, and that was really, really cool. We don't know the gender (because we want to be surprised), but my husband was a-man-of-a-thousand-questions to the ultrasounographer while I had to stare at the ceiling. She was really nice and printed out several pictures, including images of the heart, a thumb, and a foot. I then rushed off to Cleveland for the Marjane Satrapi presentation [which I may have already posted about, so I apologize for the repeat of information] and didn't think anything else about the ultrasound until the day before my next appointment, which was April 23rd. I thought that there must not have been a new problem because nobody called, and I was correct. It seems that they had my due date wrong and that I wasn't as far along as previously suspected. My new due date is September 6th, and that makes me feel a little better. Why? Because early on in the pregnancy, I was the only person who thought that I wasn't as far along as every else assumed I was. The OB Coordinator was trying to assure me that my date was correct, but I just didn't feel as if I was that far along.

Turns out I was right. Is it that my motherly instinct is already kicking in? I doubt it; I think I was basing it on when I thought things got underway and figured it couldn't have been when they thought it was.

Anyway, I want to go home, so I'll wrap it up. Later, gators.