Tuesday, December 16, 2008

SNOW...and a tale of two due dates...or make that three...

It snowed today. For several hours. Truly delightful.

I went to a new doctor today. Turns out he has been an OBGyn since I was born, and he also spent 3 or 4 of the last 7 years as an attorney working defending doctors in malpractice cases. He went back to doctoring because lawyering can be so miserable.

Anyway, I really liked him. He discovered that my records showed that I had a yeast infection that the other doc not only failed to treat me for, but also failed to inform me of even though I asked about it. And he noticed, as I did, that the ultrasounds the other doctor did all came out funkily unmatched--and, unlike the other doc, he was concerned about that. As have I been.

So he got me a prescription for medication and a referral to the Center for Maternal Fetal Medicine for an accurate ultrasound. The problem? According to my dates (which I know are accurate), the baby is due January 17. According to the first ultrasound I had, right before thanksgiving, the baby is due December 30 and was nearly 7 lbs. According to the second, which I had 2 weeks later, the baby is due December 19 and weighs 7 lbs 12 oz. You see the problem? The baby appears to be growing like a mutant! And my biggest baby so far was barely over 8 lbs--not really considered a big baby--and they've all been between 7.5 lbs and just over 8. Tests have ruled out diabetes, so the new doctor was really concerned about getting this right. He was also concerned that the two previous ultrasounds did not include a complete physical profile of the baby, even though they should have.

So we get to go down and have a high-tech ultrasound from specialists! This should be interesting, since I am fairly certain we have a healthy baby in there who is normal-sized to just slightly small for me (I'm not nearly as big as I was for my first three--more like Benji, who was my smallest baby).

So I've settled myself into the idea that we're having a baby sometime in the next 5 weeks. Since it's my fifth baby, this is a comfortable idea to me--it's really the way babies come anyway. Still, it wouldn't be bad to have a real due date, just for future reference.

Oh, and the appointment was made doubly exciting by the fire alarm going off in the middle--so we all had to traipse outside and stand in the falling snow while the security men determined that nothing was wrong.

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