Thank you everyone for your kind words of
support and for your prayers. First I was shocked that apparently, as someone
explained me, if a non-public post gets too many comments, Facebook starts
showing it in timeline of many others who were limited from it… but now that I
am receiving so much encouragement my faith index went up even more, I feel
your prayers and Ivanna does! And I am receiving a lot of private messages from
people who share similar stories that happened to them and this really is so
great to hear, I needed to hear it!
So yesterday the monitoring began. Ivanna
Marie is stable, her “well-being” number always comes back at 6/8 or 8/8 (tone,
amount of movement, amount of lungs muscle movements and amount of necessary
amniotic fluid) and the heart rate monitoring always comes back as very
healthy. And she continues kicking, I let her listen to healing prayers often
(she loves it and often starts dancing and kicking when she hears it) and I have
a lot of peace about this situation now.
My only major difficulty is sleep, I can’t
sleep more than 4 hours a day and I was probably getting migraines because of
it. But since I took that first steroid shot, the next day all of a sudden I
had so much energy. Yesterday I had a second one and today again I was full of
energy and no migraines! I hope that migraines are done though since I am not
feeling stressed anymore. Not even fearful.
Another thing is I can’t eat between 11 pm
and 11 am since I have to wait for all the morning tests to be done so that the
doctors clear me from urgent C-section that day. If any of the morning test
(bloodwork, ultrasound of placenta flow and baby well-being, half an hour
heart-rate monitoring) comes back worse than what it is now, then they will put
me into c-section right away, so this means it’s better not to eat until the
doctors clear me. It’s hard since I am usually starving by 5 am lol. But these
are all little things… and my appetite is good throughout the day.
Some of you were asking me what causes
compromised placenta or IUGR (intrauterine growth restriction, small babies).
There can be many causes and my case is a rare one. My placenta wasn’t formed
properly, the condition is called Velamentous Cord Insertion. This means the
umbilical cord does not attach to the center of placenta as it should, but
instead it splits into three blood vessels and attaches to some outer layer of
placenta. This way placenta simply can’t function to its full capacity.
Depending on the severity of IUGR women could carry the baby close to full term as
long as Doppler numbers don’t drop.. but mine dropped on the 23 week… now
because the baby still managed to gain weight doctors are becoming more
encouraging to me. Before they were only trying to convince me that baby has
not much chances… but this is not the first time it happened during these five
months.
Scary
news in October
This is about October, when I was only 5
weeks pregnant. The first time I received the bad news it sounded like this
“Maria, you have a serious condition called corneal pregnancy. This is the most
dangerous form of ectopic pregnancy, meaning that fetal sac (which is not an
embryo yet) is located on the corner of tubes and uterus and there are so many
blood vessels there, that if it ruptures, the surgery will be very complicated
and you might lose both the tube and a portion or the whole uterus. So you
should take the chemo pill for the abortion and your next pregnancy will be
better”. Ultrasound took them awhile
since they were confused and couldn’t figure out how come the fetal sac is in
such a strange place… had a few doctors come by and look at the images while I
was laying there and their faces were very shocked and perplexed.
I asked them if there is a chance they
could be wrong since at this stage they did mention that ultrasounds can still
be unclear. They said they are not 100% sure but it definitely looks like the
fetal sack is not quite inside the uterus as it should be.
I asked them what other options I have
except for taking the pill. The answer was “well, you are bleeding so much, you
will probably miscarry by morning. So we can keep you on IV for the night at
the hospital, you can’t et anything in case we have to operate and tomorrow we
will repeat the ultrasound”.
So guess what happened next morning… The
whole night I was praying, I had to tell my parents about my pregnancy and they
were praying too and they told me to wait and see, in the morning I will find
out that the doctors are wrong. I also read about one girl who had a similar
issue and her doctor jokingly said “sleep on the right side” implying that what
what if fetus climbs down since it was on the left side high up. And funny
enough it helped her even though at this stage implantation already happened
and fetus doesn’t just climb down anymore, but who knows!
So I did that! Me and Andrey were talking
to out future baby and telling him/her to climb down, we had a lot of faith. At
the morning ultrasound the radiologist’s face was funny again and she kept
looking at the same picture so many times. At the end of the ultrasound she
said, “Congratulations, pregnancy is intrauterine!” with a smile on her face. I
started to sob from happiness. Gynecologyst said that I will still need a lot
of follow up to see which way the placenta is growing since it was still too
high and to close to the tubes and if it grows too close to the tubes, it could
be a problem.
But about further adventures, there were
more of them of different kind, later. I hope this helps some of you girls to
know that doctors can say a lot of scary things but tests can still be
inconclusive, and they can be wrong, or sometimes they just scare you with the
worst possible outcome so that later you don’t tell them “how come you did not
warn me serious enough about this?” But you should listen to your inner feeling
and don’t make any rush decisions… I am hearing more and more of these stories
later and I am sure a lot of you had something like that happen. I understand
the doctor’s logic now but it was hard in the beginning.
