Monday, April 14, 2008

Big baby - not a big surprise!

Well, today I went in for yet another ultrasound. Not surprisingly this little girl was wiggling around again and making it challenging to get her measurements. Today's ultrasound was a medical ultrasound to get measurements and to make sure that baby girl is healthy. Her head, you'll be especially happy to know Amy, is right on target for her current gestational age (20 weeks and 1 day), but in other measurements she is longer and chubbier than expected (21 weeks and 4 days). This could potentially push the due date up to August 24th. Hopefully she'll hang on a little longer than that because I really need to get in at least one day at school and our first teacher day is August 22nd! Oh my goodness!

In addition to actual measurements, we got to take a peek at all of her parts. Her brain looks great. She has both hemispheres of her brain, a perfectly formed cerebellum, a well-formed brain stem, etc. She has all four chambers of her heart. She has ten fingers and ten toes. This is all very good, of course, and pretty exciting.

The only mildly disturbing thing that we also learned today is that I have a fibroid. A fibroid is basically a ball of muscle tissue and grows inside the uterus. These usually grow in women of child bearing age and are typically discovered prior to pregnancy. However, pregnancy can also trigger them to grow (or sometimes shrink) which may be why I've never noticed the fibroid before. Fibroids pose no real risk to the baby and mine is very high up in the uterus which means there is not likely to be a complication with it getting in the way at birth. Plus, at this point it is only about the size of a golf ball. While this sounds alarming, a large fibroid can be as big as a grapefruit! The only real side effect of the fibroid is one that will be an effect to me. They can be quite painful. However, since I don't know anything different, this is baby number 1 after all, I guess I'll just attribute most pains to "normal" pregnancy. The most important thing is that the fibroid should not affect the baby in any way!

Well, nature is calling - or rather baby girl is kicking my bladder and making nature call - so I've got to run. Take care everyone!

1 comment:

Andrea said...

Ooooh, big baby. They were predicting a small baby for me and Hannah was 8.5lbs and 21.5 inches. Not what I would call "small" but whatever. ;) Have any names picked out yet? BTW, glad you found some good stuff - I LOVE consignment sales!