It’s hard to believe that Emma is less than a month away from her first birthday. In honor of that upcoming milestone, I’m finally putting my memories of her birth day in writing! Back in May when I first I started jotting down bits and pieces of what I remember, I re-read my 38 weeks pregnant post. There are several things I wrote then that, in retrospect, are funny to read now:
“I have this idea — based on absolutely NOTHING — that she’s going to arrive early.” My gut feeling turned out to be right — Emma arrived at 38 weeks and 6 days. “Is it possible to have a baby without having contractions? Because that would be nice.” For the record, this is definitely NOT possible. “My doctor decided last week to send me for another ultrasound to get an idea of how much she weighs, so we get to see baby girl tomorrow!”
…and this is actually the perfect starting point.
On Wednesday, August 1, Jose and I arrived at my doctor’s office for the ultrasound she’d scheduled the week before. It was the first time I’d had an ultrasound in their new office, since they’d just moved in June. The tech estimated that Emma weighed around 7 pounds and started pointing out various body parts, but then started concentrating on the area around her bladder. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then of course my mind starting going crazy — and not in a good way.
She explained that it looked unusual…but that Emma’s bladder was full and could be interfering with her scan. She asked me to go walk around for 20-30 minutes in hopes that Emma would “pee” and allow her a better look.
As you can imagine, hearing that something looked “unusual” was NOT what I expected to hear. And it was definitely not what I WANTED to hear. And so Jose and I did laps around the building while I tried — with only partial success — to keep from bursting into tears.
The second look showed that Emma had indeed emptied her bladder like a champ, but the unusual signature was still there. The details have gotten fuzzy now, 11 months later, but I remember the tech explaining that there are two arteries and one vein that run through the umbilical cord. The two arteries usually run into the baby (at the belly button, obviously) and then wrap around either side of the bladder. One artery looked fine, but the other one looked bunched up or bundled somehow.
My doctor came in to observe, and was similarly stumped. An ultrasound tech and the doctor both confused about what was going on with the baby still in my belly? I was struggling to hold it together as my doctor decided to schedule me for another ultrasound the next day with the other doctor in her practice, who had even more experience reading ultrasounds than she did.
That night, my dad called to tell me that my grandmother had passed away. Although it wasn’t a total surprise since her health had been declining for some time, it was still very sad. There’s no way I could have gotten on an airplane to attend the funeral, which upset me as well.
August 1 was just not a good day.
The next day arrived and we were back at the office again, anxious and a little scared. I went through the rigamarole again — sit down, lean back, shirt up, gel smeared around — and the other doctor started peering at the screen. After a few minutes, he agreed that whatever was going on around Emma’s bladder looked unusual but he wasn’t worried enough to recommend any action other than checking it out after Emma arrived. Finally a bit of good news! I started to relax for about 5 seconds…
…and then he looked at my chart. My doctor had started checking me at each weekly visit to see if/how much I had dilated. By 38 weeks, I was already at 3 centimeters — which I actually had thought was pretty nice since I’d had zero contractions. (And now my earlier comment about giving birth without contractions makes more sense, right?)
Anyway, when the doctor saw that he made a rather casual comment about how we could just schedule an induction for the following week — since I was already in some sort of “favorable” state for induction.
As if I wasn’t already stressed enough…
My own doctor came back in to chat and left things very open-ended. (She also said they even looked in books trying to identify what was going on with Emma’s arteries/bladder and couldn’t come up with anything. Which was AWESOME to hear. And by awesome I mean NOT awesome.) She couldn’t say that the induction was “medically indicated,” and that meant that the earliest an induction could be scheduled was the following Tuesday — you’re not allowed to be voluntarily induced prior to 39 weeks. It was up to me. Did I want to be induced, in order to get Emma here and get her checked out sooner? Or did I want to just let things happen when they happened?
How the heck was I supposed to make that decision??
My first instinct was not to induce. I didn’t have any kind of formal birth plan, but I also really didn’t want to be induced. I hoped to go into labor on my own, whenever the time was right. But Jose’s first instinct was to go for it. We’d get Emma out and could figure out whether there was actually a problem, and we’d get the advantage of being able to schedule when she arrived.
We talked for a while and in the end, I agreed with Jose’s rationale and we decided that I would be induced. It would be scheduled for late the following week and just after I hung up the phone, I said “well, it sure would be nice if I went into labor on my own before then!” Little did I know…
To be continued!
(Although in the interest of not leaving anyone too alarmed: ultimately there was nothing wrong with Emma’s bladder after all — an ultrasound when she was 5 days old showed nothing out of the ordinary.)
Jennifer says
Wow, that must have been incredibly stressful.
becca says
I’m sorry you were so stressed!!!! You know your Houston friends would have been here with non-alcoholic wine nights to help you vent..