So as of yesterday, our unborn child is the size of a cauliflower (a pretty large one if the measurements from my last ultrasound are to go by). He or she has grown, however, from being a red cabbage last week and the length of a cucumber the week before. It’s quite amusing to do the weekly shop and think you are holding the fruit or vegetable, which corresponds to baby’s weight or size. We have graduated from the little peanut to the runner bean and continued to blossom from fig to avocado to grapefruit to well… the slightly less glamorous cauliflower.
These small increments are helping me tick off the milestones as I reach them. Finally, I have hit the third trimester and that is one big hurdle to have crossed. It started with just wanting to reach the ‘safe’ twelve-week mark, to then making it another couple of weeks into the second trimester. Then came the 20-week milestone and waiting for the “all clear” from the morphology scan. After this I breathed a little easier and allowed myself our first purchase of one babygro! (Or bodysuit depending on where you are.) Then the parameters were pushed further to just wanting to reach 25 weeks, the next ‘safe’ mark when in theory, a baby can survive outside the womb (with a lot of medical assistance) and now I’ve made it to almost 28 weeks, I’m already looking to the next big one: 35, when I’ll have my next scan.
Profile of baby at 20 weeks
This pregnancy has definitely been one of stages: the nausea stage, the worrying stage, the itching phase, the “I think everything’s ok now” stage, the baby brain stage (not sure I’ve quite got through that one yet) and I’ve almost got to the ‘home-stretch’ stage. By the time James is back I’ll be past 31 weeks and when he leaves again, I’ll be nearly 35. Then we just have to hope that baby decides to stay in there until at least 38 weeks when James will finally return for a few weeks, and at least until after the birth.
I’d like to say it’s been a completely smooth ride and in hindsight, there has never been anything wrong; the ‘womb child’ as my meditation CD likes to call it, has been measuring correct for dates, growing consistently and has shown no signs of problems. But after the relief of subsiding nausea from week 15, I started getting the abdominal pains. They weren’t too severe but enough for the GP to recommend an abdominal scan (probably to check for any gall bladder issues.)
I got the call that evening with his first line being, “Well, the baby is fine.”
After that I almost didn’t listen to the next bit. The baby was fine, that was all that mattered.
“But they did find a small mass on your liver.”
“Right.”
“But we don’t think it is sinister.”
OK. That doesn’t sound so great but still, the baby was fine. I hung up.
It was only lying in bed that night that I played through the conversation and suddenly “mass” became “tumour” and “don’t think it is sinister,” translated to, “it could be.”
Now try telling a first time pregnant lady (or indeed any pregnant lady) that she has a growth, which they can’t properly diagnose because of the limited procedures possible during pregnancy, and expect her not to worry. Try telling her it will be ok when one possible diagnosis is a hormone-related growth, which could continue to enlarge and even rupture and requires constant monitoring and then ask her not to go to bed worrying that something terrible is going to happen while she sleeps while those lovely hormone levels continue to rise.
I managed to put it to the back of my mind until the itching started. I’m not talking the odd itchy moment, or the normal skin stretching type of itching as your belly expands, I’m talking all-over body, drive-you-nuts itching that wakes you up every hour of the night and is only temporarily soothed with an ice block, kept by the side of the bed. I bought out the local chemist’s supply of calamine lotion and oatmeal moisturisers, even took tepid baths with oatmeal, which made the bathroom smell of porridge. I would like to say I stepped away from Doctor Google but during my frantic scratching sessions, I found some reassurance that itchy skin is quite common… Oh, hang on, unless it’s the condition linked to your liver function, which is actually potentially very harmful.
Back to the GP. Liver panel test immediately ordered and results: normal. Itching continues. More googling. Apparently it is the bile acid levels that should be tested. Back to the GP. Bile acid tests done. Ten days of waiting. Results: normal.
A week later a third liver scan reveals no change and the likely diagnosis is a completely benign hemangioma. By this point I am more reassured, even though I had already been referred to the obstetrician for a second opinion and was told, with a roll of the eyes, that there was, “no need to worry.”
Finally, I can relax (with the help of the womb child meditation CD, lent to me by a friend.)
I am pleased to say that so far since then, all has been going well. I have been going to prenatal yoga, which has been amazing, and taught by one of the midwives at the hospital. It is great to stretch but not always so great when one of the other ladies informs us that one particular move is meant to bring on labour. We were assured, the move was entirely different. I seem to have a fan inside me too judging by the jabs in my stomach as I touch my toes. (I can still do this… perhaps it’s being squashed.) Mind you, the jabs are fairly frequent and have been pretty strong for several weeks. He or she seems to perform a Hakka inside me every night, which does not always make for a comfortable sleep, and I am fairly used to my stomach pulsing away as I sit down for my nightly dose of Masterchef.
In fact my only issue has been with me, and my brain, or lack of. Quite how I went from being completely able to hold a normal conversation one day to forgetting half of my vocabulary the next is beyond me. I have at times driven the wrong way home from the hospital, which has become quite a frequent trip of late, spent fifteen minutes looking for the car I’ve ‘lost’ in the car park, burnt toast because I’ve put it down in the toaster twice, and even left the hob on for hours after cooking. Worse still, was returning home from the shops to the unlocked front door, the lights on and the balcony doors wide open. After tentatively opening doors, thinking a burglar was hiding somewhere, I realised that in fact, it was just me, who had left the house completely wide open. Try telling me that ‘baby brain’ is all in my imagination.
The bump is growing (although have been frequently told it is “very compact”.) During a maternity jeans purchase the other week, the sales assistant said he hadn’t realised I was pregnant and had been about to point out that I was buying maternity jeans. When I informed him I was six months pregnant, you could have prised his jaw from the floor. More disconcerting was the lady at the swimming pool who said she thought I must be “just a few weeks along” when I’m stood there in a wet costume, clinging to what is most definitely a round bump – holding a cauliflower no less (or I think it might have been a cabbage at that point.)
I guess now I should actually start to buy things. Thanks to my mum he or she will at least have a couple of things to wear. This arrived in the post the other week to much excitement!
Baby outfit
However, the poor child as yet has nowhere to sleep, nothing to ride home in from hospital, will be wearing one of a total of three newborn vests and certainly has no blankets, nappies or anywhere to be changed. I have a good few weeks left to go but would rather have finished the shopping before I get to elephantine proportions where a trip to the shops is more of a breathless waddle interspersed by dashes to the toilet. By that point the baby will have gone through the pineapple stage to more of a watermelon, but at least that’s a little more exotic than a cauliflower.
Upside Down 