a quick health update

We had some scares this week, and almost had the baby yesterday. I haven’t gotten to update.

First, as you can see from the photo, E has preeclampsia, her legs and ankles have swollen to over double their normal size. She can’t get her wedding rings on, and has flashes of light in her right eye. So far it’s not caused anything major, and seems to be a mild enough case that she’s not even passing protein in her urine. This is good. The swelling went down enough over the last two days that it’s not as painful.

Second, we got a sonogram two Fridays ago that showed the baby as being small, and the fluid level around the baby measuring on the very low normal scale. From there it could go one of two ways.

On one hand, babies grow at different weights, and don’t always correspond to the textbook weight and size associated with the particular week of gestation.

On the other hand, there is the worry of “intrauterine fetal growth retardation (IUGR)”, which means that toward the end of gestation the growth is trailing off, and the baby needs to come out ASAP. This is extra scary, because the higher the presence of IUGR and the more the growth trails off, the higher the possibility of still birth.

I started to have a lot of respect for the mother/child bond at this point, because E was not worried. She couldn’t explain how she knew, she just knew there was nothing wrong with him. In addition, his movement level has been high, and on the sonograms he has been making breathing movements and chewing motions, both of which are good. His heartbeats have been strong, indicating a continuing good blood supply.

We went to the sonogram on Tuesday, which showed he was still small. The doctor was being extremely cautious at that point, and wanted bi-weekly sonograms. We made another appointment for yesterday (Friday), and fully expected that she would have to be induced.

We packed our bags Friday morning, put the car seat in the car and brought a change of clothes.

We did the sonogram, and it actually showed that he had gained half a pound, and the fluid level around him had increased to the point that there was no worry. He was double the bottom floor value of normality in terms of biophysical profile, and seemed to have picked up growth enough that there was no worry and no reason to induce.

So we’re back to waiting until labor occurs normally, but obviously super happy nothing was wrong.