You Know The Drill

Unfortunately this post is going to be very random and all over the place due to extreme fatigue and sinus-head. I came down with a headcold the last day of the conference and since I'm still pregnant I can't/won't take anything for it, so here I am, stuffy and mouth breathing and lightheaded. But here are the highlights of my life the last few days!

-my client is still pregnant, so her birth will count towards my certification! Yay! I am a little bummed that she's agreed to induction on Thursday if labor doesn't start on its own, but she has a lot of extenuating circumstances going on that make me very understanding of how much she wants to get this birth over with. She'll be thirty nine weeks on Wednesday, so she's close to being due, and the baby is thought to be over eight pounds already, plus she's already dilated/effaced a bit, so hopefully if there is an induction her body will be ready enough to go into labor that it won't be too rough of an experience. Either way, I'm super excited, and very intent on getting myself well before she has the baby so I can do a good job and not be blowing my nose and hacking while she's trying to get through contractions.

-the conference was AMAZING, seriously, so much better than I'd even hoped. I am so so happy I found this place and got to meet all these wonderful women and learn so much. There was such a wide variety of experiences, reasons for taking the workshops, birthing backgrounds and history, age, etc. but everyone really clicked and I felt like I made some great connections personally and professionally. And you guys were right, while I was going through some further concern about the pregnancy (I'll get to that later) there could not have been a kinder and more supportive group of strangers with which to go through it.

-I loved staying with my aunt. She is so awesome and fun, and treated me like a queen. I got delicious homemade meals, a spotless condo in which to relax, and someone to hang out with in the evenings. It beat staying in a hotel by a loooong shot. Thank you, Aunt Nancy!

-She also went over and above good hostess requirements by driving all over trying to help me find a charger that would work with my phone when I realized that I had forgotten to pack mine. Unfortunately none of the ones we bought would work, despite saying that they were compatible with my phone's make and model, and we even bought a battery in case that was the problem, but alas nothing worked and I ended up spending the last two days I was gone without a phone. It felt strange! But when I got home my own charger worked just fine. ??? MYSTERY. Also, craptastic phone.

-Related to the theme of electronic devices, I pulled over at a Meijer just outside of Ann Arbor and bought myself a GPS on my way home last night, after having managed to get myself turned around and confused for the third time that weekend. I had all my little maps and people had given me directions for getting back to the interstate, so I should have been FINE. I was trying to reverse my printed Mapquest directions that I used to drive TO Ann Arbor, but I just couldn't figure it out! I seem to have a) some kind of handicap re: following directions b)the world's worst sense of direction/spacial awareness in the world and c) once I make one wrong turn I just kind of freeze up and get confused. I seem unable to reason my way through the process of, say, getting back to where I started or of logic-ing out where I am in relation to other streets. So. I made a command decision to stop pretending I am a grown up woman who can find her way around and decided it was time to get myself a GPS and cease the wandering around in panicky circles once and for all.

-Lastly, I got a call from my doctor's office at eight thirty Friday morning on my way to the conference to let me know that my progesterone had dropped from the not-great-but-not-yet-terrible thirteen point five to a genuinely dismal ten. They wanted me to find a compounding pharmacy in Ann Arbor to which they could call in two different hormone supplements as soon as possible. So... I did (and my, what an adventure that was, trying to locate this random pharmacy in a city I've never driven in before, during my lunch break at the workshop!) I never took anything with Jameson's pregnancy and he hung in there, but his progesterone never went below a fifteen, so it was much better to begin with. I've actually never had my progesterone drop like this; it always stayed where it was or maybe went up just a titch. So while now I'm trying to resign myself to the fact that this is probably in the process of failing, I also felt within my heart that if I didn't throw everything medical at it that I could, I'd feel doubly awful if/when I did miscarry, especially considering I hadn't actually wanted to be pregnant in the first place. Guilt and all that, you know.

So I'm taking progesterone three times a day, in various forms (!), but I've also got a call in with the doctor to inform them that if I cooperate and do all the drugs, I'm going to require a weekly scan to assure me that it is in fact working and the baby's still growing and/or to let me know as soon as possible if it does stop growing. They didn't have me coming in for a scan until a month from now, but I am NOT going to walk around for a month hoping against hope that maybe the pills are working some magic when in fact the heartbeat stopped weeks earlier, you know? So maybe I'm being demanding, but this is what I need to stay sane. By this point in my reproductive game, I am an INFORMED CONSUMER who knows what she wants, dang it.