Heartbeat

I haven't posted in a while, mainly because I haven't had anything positive or upbeat to say, and I realize that people only want to read so much bitching and moaning about how miserable I am and how bad I feel.

But today was my first prenatal appointment, and I heard the heartbeat! Yes, heard, not saw, because my midwife practice only does a doppler at this appointment. They don't even really do ultrasounds at their office - you go to the main hospital for them. I can honestly say that I didn't really "feel" anything when I heard it. I mean, I wasn't like, "oh my god, there it is, that's my baby's heartbeat!!" or have some crazy realization that "wow, so there really IS a baby growing in there!". I was just like, "ok, that's cool".

But, I recorded it on my phone, and once I got home and listened to it a few times, I felt a little more excited about it. As I've said, and I still believe, I'm going to need an ultrasound to actually SEE this thing before I can get really excited. And I also think I need to feel better.

But, the heartbeat WAS cool. The doppler wouldn't display a heartrate; the midwife thinks it was confused because it was picking up my heartbeat, too. But she said to her "trained ear" it sounded like around 170-180 beats per minute.

Then she said congratulations, and that my risk of miscarriage went down to either 1% or less than 1% (I forget which). So, that's good.

[I tried to put the audio/video of the heartbeat in this post, but I kept getting an error message, so I gave up.]

They'd had me undress completely because supposedly this appointment comes with a full physical exam, but the midwife said I didn't need to do any of that since I just had a physical exam and pap with them recently (required before starting the insemination process).

Before the heartbeat, the midwife and I just talked, she reviewed my health history with me, asked me some questions, and I asked her mine. Nothing really new in terms of helping me feel better, other than the suggestion to take unisom, but I'm afraid to take that the night before I have to work for 12 hours... Maybe I'll try it on a night when I'm not working the next day. And she told me to take colace for constipation (due to pregnancy and enhanced by the Zofran, awesome).

I had a lot of bloodwork done. Even though I don't think I really need this, I'm having a cystic fibrosis and Ashkenazi Jewish panel done, to see if I'm a carrier for anything. It's highly unlikely it'll even matter, since the donor was tested for anything he'd be likely to carry, but I figure if insurance will cover it, I'd like to know.

One other random thing that really doesn't belong in this post:

I logged on to the CCB website a week or two ago and reported my pregnancy. Not sure why I did this so soon, but I figured I can always go back and update it if needed. So then a few days letter, I received a whole packet in the mail of printouts of most of the donor info from the site - stuff I had paid to be able to view, but not save or print out! There was a letter thanking me for reporting my pregnancy, and that they were sending me this donor information packet as a thank-you gift. I REALLY liked this, not just because I got the info without having to pay extra for it (which I was completely planning to do eventually), but also because it shows that CCB really does value the tracking progress, and really does want people/families to report their pregnancies and births so they can track them. Two points for CCB!