3 weeks to go!

We have our official planned induction date. If all goes well, we will start the induction process on April 3rd. If the baby gets here the next day it will share a birthday with its twin cousins Miranda and Miley. They have informed me that, if it is born on their birthday, they “Will feed him birthday cake.” They have been brainwashed by their mama who has decided the baby is a boy.

Our Dr. is fantastic. I had a less-than-satisfactory experience last Friday with a different Dr. in the practice. I was there for 4 hours total. After 2 hrs on the fetal monitor (this usually takes half an hour tops) she finally sent me to have another Biophysical Profile without ever coming in to see me. I really didn’t feel like anything was wrong but I am, of course, happy to have whatever check we need to make sure the baby is safe. Ah, the irony of our big plan to only have the two ultrasounds turning into 5….so far.  I have resigned myself that I have ended up being one of the special cases that actually does need to have more than just the minimum, but I really feel like a Dr should come and talk to a patient if she is worried something is wrong with their baby and not just send them willy nilly off to have extra tests. I never did even see her.

This is the same Dr who went right to “I’ll be happy to get two more weeks out of you” when we were in the hospital being diagnosed with Cholestasis of Pregnancy at 29 weeks. She seems to go straight to the worst possible scenario while our Dr. seems a little more positive. She definitely explains things much better and makes sure I know what’s gong on.  She sat with me for my entire NST on Tuesday and we talked about how things have been going and what next steps are.  She feels comfortable with my liver levels and bile acids and has decided that we can have an extra week so the baby can bake for 37 weeks rather than 36.

We are VERY happy about this change in plans. We haven’t had many positive changes to our plans so far, so an extra week of growth with so much important development happening is music to our ears. That means we’ll be officially getting a full term baby and not a preemie! Of course, I wouldn’t complain too much if I went into labor on my own a few days shy of 37 weeks and got to totally avoid all this induction nonsense. But I’ll settle for the possibility that my body could be getting close to being ready to deliver and will tolerate the induction methods much better than if I was nowhere near ready.

Next up….DOULA love

6 Weeks and 3 days to go

Today I went in for the first of my twice-weekly Dr’s appointments. Driving from home to the Dr’s office was miserable. Moving around got my blood flowing, meaning it also got the toxins moving around and depositing all over my skin. Being away from my ice packs meant I thought I might scream from the effort not to scratch. I’m not really confident in the safety of me driving a car right now, honestly. That is not something they call out on any of the Cholestasis of Pregnancy websites I’ve come across so far.

The non-stress test on the baby took longer than usual because our little one is a squirmer. This is GREAT news! I’m supposed to do kick counts every day to make sure the baby isn’t suddenly having a drop in movement so confirming a very active baby was a big relief. Keeping track of movements is really the only way I have of knowing if the baby is doing ok in between Dr’s appointments when we get to check the heart rate. If we get a day with little or no movement we’ll have to hurry to get the baby on a monitor as it could mean distress.  That was, thankfully, not a problem today. On top of a wriggly baby who kept moving its heart away from the monitor, the little one also got the hiccups for 10 or 15 minutes while we were trying to track its heart rate today. I could see and feel my belly bouncing rhythmically with each hiccup and the heart rate monitor kept getting hiccups confused with heartbeats. It was sort of adorable. Eventually everything calmed down enough to get a good long reading and the baby passed its first non-stress test this week!

I was not so lucky and I could see the sympathy in my Dr’s eyes as I clawed at myself from the moment she walked in the room. She feels like I should be having more improvement in my symptoms by now so she upped my dosage of Urso and wrote a new RX for some steroids to hopefully get my itching under control. She also wanted to check my blood pressure again, even though the nurse already had. I think that’s always a bad sign. It wasn’t SCARY high but it was higher than she would like it to be so my BP has been added to the list of items we’ll be watching closely twice a week now. I also got my blood drawn again so in a few days we’ll find out if my acid levels are dropping and how quickly. In the meantime, she wants me to take it easy and keep my activity levels down. She didn’t put me on full-on bed rest but it looks like I’ll be working from my couch and sticking close to home “until further notice.”

Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow morning itch-free and Friday my levels will come back totally normal and I’ll be free to go about my life as usual. A girl can dream, right?

You know what is ironic?

Being released from the hospital where you have been informed that the absolute LATEST your baby will be allowed to arrive is 7 weeks from now at 36 weeks gestation and coming home to a letter from your insurance company telling you that it is IMPERATIVE that you let your baby cook the full 40 weeks and giving a bullet pointed list of all of the horrible things that can happen to your baby if you voluntarily schedule delivery before then.

It’s very helpful to your emotional well-being, let me tell you.

Apparently I couldn’t just call it a day at kidney stones and have an uneventful third trimester. Instead I went to a regularly scheduled appointment hoping to get the go-ahead to take Benadryl for my itchy feet and got admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with Cholestasis of Pregnancy.

Something is wrong with my gallbladder and it is not draining bile from my liver like it’s supposed to. Instead, all that toxic goo is just spilling over into my bloodstream. And it makes me itchy. So very, very itchy. There are other symptoms. Some of which have to do with what color things are in the toilet department so I’ll just let you Google to your heart’s content in that area. It’s not really likely to be harmful to me, just really annoying and uncomfortable. The baby is another story. Still birth is a big risk with this condition because the toxins can pass to the baby. So we walk a fine line of keeping the baby in until it has time to mature enough to survive in the outside world and keeping it safe from the toxins in my blood.

So I am taking a medicine called Urso that will hopefully lower my bile acid numbers and I will be closely monitored twice a week to check the baby’s heart rate and stress level as well as my acid levels. If things stay low enough to be safe and the baby stays healthy, we will get to continue gestating for 7 more weeks and then induce labor (boo) to bring the baby 4 weeks early. If my numbers get too high or the baby goes into distress, we’ll have an even earlier baby.

In the meantime I try not to scratch too much and try not to worry too much and fail at both. I have bruised myself from clawing and I can barely function because the itching never goes away and is so distracting. I do ok if I can stick close to home and rotate ice packs on my itchy spots constantly. This also includes lots of sitting with my feet in ice cold water and wet towels wrapped around my legs. I attempted to go back to work today and only lasted a few hours before coming home to work from here where I could cover myself in ice packs. It looks like I might be working from home a bit longer, depending on if the Urso kicks in to lower my levels enough to help with the itching.

It’s been almost a week since that terrifying night in the hospital where the on-call Dr. told us she’d be happy to get 2 more weeks out of me. Thankfully my regular Dr. has a more positive outlook so far but the constant uncertainty of what could happen next and worrying that my own body is hurting my baby is difficult to deal with. We just try to stay positive and focus on the success stories of people we know who have been through this and came out the other end just fine with a healthy baby while trying to be mentally prepared for the other possible outcomes. If I have to be itchy for 7 more weeks, then so be it. But I’d rather have my medicine work on my acid levels AND my itchiness so that I’m not clawing at myself while I still get to cook this munchkin for 7 more weeks.