Saturday, August 09, 2008

Abdominal Ultrasound #2

My due date is four months from today. Hard to believe we're over halfway there.

I have been fighting a cold this week, and there were three nights in a row of miserable sleep. Night 1: Miserable sore throat. Night 2: Miserable runny nose. Night 3: Miserable cough. I checked with my doctor to see what I could take to relieve some of my symptoms, so when I went in Thursday for my monthly appointment, it had been after two miserable nights of sleep and a day on Sudafed.

My blood pressure was a little elevated, possibly explained away by the medicine, but I am going back in a couple weeks to verify that it is due to that instead of due to the pregnancy. That, combined with my uterus measuring slightly small for my dates, found me back in the doctor's office Friday for another ultrasound.

The technician scoffed at the doctor's concern, as my baby was measuring just fine, within three days of the due date; as she said, "He's trying to measure your uterus with a tape measure from outside your body, and he's worried you're off a couple centimeters?" But we did get another chance to see our little one, now at about 15 ounces.

At one point I caused Eric and the technician to explode in laughter at my expense. She had been measuring the baby's heart, head, and other areas, when I heard her say, "And here's the finger." As it was measuring several centimeters, I suddenly said, "Oh my gosh, that finger's HUGE!"

Eric corrected, "Honey, she said FEMUR." Um, yeah. I'm glad I can say that my child does not have ET's hands. I'd like to add my ears have been plugged, and it was probably distorted coming through the fog that is my head cold.

We wondered if we could find out the sex, and while our tech tried, our baby would have none of it. Her thoughts were that a child modest for two ultrasounds is likely to be a girl -- apparently boys have trouble keeping it to themselves. Although at one point, the hand was between the legs, and that made her question her assessment ("unless she's holding the umbilical cord and it happened to go down there"). So she said, with less than sixty percent confidence, a girl. I'm wondering if I should tempt fate and knit a girly sweater or a sun dress once I finish with my gender-neutral sweater.