Still There!

So, we've completed another successful appointment with a confirmed heartbeat and dancing baby.  So far, so good.  Even in the long pregnancy, at this point I'd already had a 24 hour bleeding scare.  This time?  Nada.  I'm faithfully taking my meds, itching or no itching, and have been doing my very best to remain relaxed and calm.  For the most part I feel great and my pregnancy symptoms have been mellow and manageable.

I had a big fat insurance snafu at my last appointment so we opted not to do the blood work that time around just in case I was going to have to pay cash for it (which was going to be somewhere in the ballpark of $2500) but that has since been worked out so they drew about eight bazillion viles of blood yesterday - waaaayyy more than my last OB ever took.  It was almost as bad as the panel they took during the infertility testing.  I'm still amazed by the fact that our bodies have enough blood to give that much and still manage to function.  For reals.  Anyhooters, I'll be interested to see if anything comes out of this blood work.  My sister, who's pregnant and due in March, had some thyroid issues and has had several appointments with a specialist because of it.  

Matt came with me to my appointment and that turned out to be fun for us to do together.  We sat in the ultrasound room and made jokes about just doing the ultrasound ourselves since we'd had so freaking many in the last two years anyway.  We then discussed the lube warmer that they had in the room and then laughed when they didn't even use the warm stuff.  Matt has decided these ultrasounds must be very uncomfortable and I told him we could do one up him bum just to give him an idea.  He politely declined.

I've had some ridiculous cold for almost ten days now.  I finally got a Z-pac from my OB yesterday at my appointment but she mentioned that this was probably a virus and would just have to go away on it's own.  After the first day of the meds, I'm thinking she's right.  I haven't been sick for this long in years and not being able to take my typical cold meds has made it more difficult.  The nice part is that the boss has been super easygoing and there's not a lot going on with work right now so I've been able to spend a lot of time resting.  It's been super nice although I feel like the world's biggest lazy butt.  I slept most of the day on Monday and this morning I haven't left the couch since taking a nice long shower.  Between the sickness and the pregnancy I'm fairly certain I could sleep 20 hours a day and be juuuuust fine. 

Today I need to make an appointment for my NT screening.  This one is new and not something my last OB said anything about.  It's usually done between 12-16 weeks and helps determine if the baby has downs syndrome or other chromosomal anomalies.  It's also an additional ultrasound which is nice.  I'm wondering if I can drag it out a little bit longer and go for more like the 16 week time so that we might have a better chance of finding out the sex a little bit earlier than 20 weeks.  I really feel like I'm not going to be able to do anything for this baby until we find out what it is.

I'm also nervous to do anything until we get past where I was last time when I miscarried.  That's still the bummer about this whole thing.  I can't get excited, I can't get my hopes up, I can't go out and buy a bunch of baby stuff - none of it.  It's hard to put into words how all of this feels.  Every single time I go to the bathroom or feel any sort of strangeness in my nether-regions, I'm sure that I'm miscarrying.  Between normal pregnancy discharge (I am SO sorry to use that word.  I thought and thought and couldn't for the life of me think of another) and the progesterone suppository messiness, I run to the bathroom at least twice a day to check for blood.  Gas bubbles and normal digestive feelings are all misinterpreted to be cramping and miscarriage.  It's nerve wracking and I'm not sure that it will go away until I have a living, breathing baby coming out of my body.

At least fifteen friends announced pregnancies on Facebook on Christmas Eve or Day and I'm fairly certain there are a few more coming.  I'm trying hard to be excited for people but once again I find myself a bit resentful.  I can't bring myself to announce it because it seems as soon as I do, it's not to far off that I'll lose the baby.  I find myself wondering if any of them will lose their babies and part of me wonders if in some strange way that will make me feel better...like I'm not the only one?  It's a really horrible way to think and feel but I'm trying to be very honest here about how this all feels and that's a truth about what I'm going through, and that's part of my truth.  I've only had one friend lose a baby since my last miscarriage and her situation was SO completely outrageous and unusual I broke down and cried for her the second I found out.  I guess that proves there is some compassion about all of this left inside of me, huh?  Sometimes I really wonder.

So there's the update.  The baby was measuring 9 weeks 5 days but the doctor left my due date at July 23rd since we're in the ball park and due dates usually change a bit as the baby grows anyway.  Still not excited about being nine months pregnant in Phoenix in July, but hopefully June 2012 is as balmy and wonderful as last June was so I'll only have one month of being truly hot.  With my luck, it will reach 150 in May.