When I did eventually become pregnant, it turned out my body was pretty good at pregnancy. Probably rather too good at it in fact, as all my pregnancy symptoms were turned up to the max.
I first noticed it with my first blood test. With IVF treatment you have a blood test to see if it’s been successful, rather than waiting to do a conventional urine pregnancy test, but when the crucial time came, they couldn’t get any blood out of me. At all. It took 3 different nurses 5 attempts to get blood and they only managed it after I’d drunk lots of water and orange juice and a nurse sedationist tried a vein in my forearm that isn’t usually used. Apparently, in early pregnancy you can become dehydrated as your fluids are diverted to support the growing baby, and my body certainly didn’t want to waste fluid on me!!!
Then came the sickness. When I was 6 weeks pregnant, I started to feel nauseous pretty much all the time. By 7 weeks I began being sick throughout the day. And at 8 weeks, having spent a week trying not to get out of bed (moving made the sickness worse), I ended up in A&E with a blood clot in my leg. Apparently, your clotting ability increases during pregnancy to help prevent you losing too much blood during labour, and my body had quickly taken it’s new responsiblities seriously, sending coagulation into overdrive and producing a DVT (deep vein thrombosis).
Thankfully we caught it early (points to Mr Meltdown!) but it meant I needed to inject an anti-coagulant throughout my whole pregnancy and for 6 weeks afterwards (just a few weeks to go!) and became a ‘complicated’ pregnancy from that point onwards.
The drama wasn’t over though. The 12 week blood tests suggested Mini Meltdown’s placenta might not be working as effectively as normal, so I then had to start taking aspirn too, and have extra scans to monitor MM’s growth. At 15 and 16 weeks I had some bleeding that resulted in a couple of stays in hospital for monitoring, before it was concluded that it was probably caused by a low lying placenta and made worse by the anti-coagulant I was taking. Then at 27 weeks, the first of the extra scans to check MM was not underweight revealed he was in fact a very big baby (on the 90th percentile) so I then needed to be tested for pregnancy diabetes. Thankfully, my test came back normal, much to Mr Meltdown’s surprise, as he was sure I’d add that to my pregnancy conditions collection…..
A few other curve balls came our way too, and they all led me to assume that when it came to giving birth, the labour and delivery wouldn’t be straightforward either. And I was right.
Adventures with Mini Meltdown 