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2004-08-27 - 10.00pm��previous entry��next entry
30 weeks!!! - osteopath appointment
Yay, 30 weeks pregnant!!! Three quarters of the way there! I can�t believe Arthur is due to arrive in exactly 10 weeks. I wonder if he�ll be here by then or if I�ll still be waiting? It�s so exciting!
He now weighs roughly 3lbs! Well, maybe just under, but 3lbs-ish. He is about 40cm long (15.7 inches) from head to heel. His pupils now respond to light by contracting and dilating, and his lanugo (fine body hair) is now almost completely gone, with only a little left on his shoulders and back. His head-hair is getting thicker :) I read a post by a lady who just had an ultrasound at this stage, and she said her baby had so much hair they could see it on the ultrasound! She said it was like a little loo brush (!), all floating out like a little Mohican cut in the amniotic fluid! How sweet! I wonder what colour hair Arthur will have (after the newborn stuff wears away that is!)? I wonder about lots of things about Arthur these days. I can�t wait to meet him and find out! Arthur�s little testicles should be descending now, and they should be fully descended by the time he�s born (I hope!). His irises have colour to them now, and he is now producing all his red blood cells in his bone marrow instead of his spleen! Clever boy :). He has the hiccups again (good boy!), they just started while I was writing this paragraph. He is transverse still, but today he is lying opposite to where he normally lies. His head is on my right side today, and that�s the first time I�ve ever noticed that. I always have his legs kicking me in my right side so it�s weird to feel it all the other way round! His hiccups are really strong, I can feel them jolting quite hard near his head. Bless him :)
Neil took a belly pic this evening and I�ve put it in the belly gallery for 30 weeks! I don�t know if I�m bigger or not, I am starting to lose track! I just feel big all the time, and �bigger� or �not bigger� is starting to feel a bit irrelevant because I just feel BIG! I guess I probably am bigger. I don�t like the photo so much because I felt tired and puffy/chubby and I think that�s exactly how I look in the photo, but oh well. It�s a good one of Arthur anyway! :)
Thank you for all the well-wishes and prayers for my appointment with the osteopath! I went this afternoon, and Neil was so lovely, he took the afternoon off work so he could drive me there. I can drive no problem, but I just get so tired lately, and it was a long drive so I felt anxious about being able to get home again safely after the appointment, if I felt wiped out. Poor Neil has to make up his hours, I feel so bad :( But I have another appointment next Friday, and he is insisting on taking the time out to drive me again. In the end I am really glad he was there, because he got to see everything happening at the appointment, and also it�s a private osteopath, not a clinic, so it was at this guy�s home and I had to strip down to my underwear! I know he is highly recommended and a specialist in his line, and trustworthy, but yeah, I was sort of glad Neil was there in the room too!
The appointment went well. The osteopath was really nice. He is called Quentin Shaw. I don�t mind google hits on that. I�m glad I found his name through online searches myself, so if anyone ever reads this and wants to know how they can get in touch with him, please email me or sign the guestbook and I�d be glad to pass on his details.
First he took down a ton of details about me, and asked me a billion questions about my back and my symptoms and my general health over the years, etc. He was particularly interested in the fact that I�d had M.E. and bad IBS. He reckons they are connected to my back/pelvic issues, or that the M.E could have contributed to the problem, and that my IBS being so bad and unresponsive to treatment might be because it�s largely due to my back issues! Wow! I hope he�s right and that he can fix more than what I was going to him for!
When I took my clothes off he looked at my back and hips for ages and felt the bones for a while, and he said my spine is a little twisted, and that one side of my pelvis is rotated forwards slightly, and the other side is rotated backwards. He said I have a very slim torso, and that my ribcage is quite tight and slender, and doesn�t appear to be expanding to allow much room for the baby up at the top. I said he has been lying low all this pregnancy and Quentin said he wasn�t surprised. Then I got on the table and he had me lie flat on my back, no pillow, no support, which I haven�t done for months because of how you�re not really meant to when your womb is heavy enough to compress the major blood vessels behind it. I had noooo idea how painful it had become to lie flat on my back! My pelvis just hurt sooooo much all over that I couldn�t relax my legs at all, or breathe normally, so he put a pillow under my knees to ease the strain. Then he worked my legs up to my chest and round to the sides, while he kept a hand under my pelvis at the back. The right side was okay, but when he did the left side it hurt a lot where he was pressing his fingers under my back. I asked him if it should hurt and he said it may well do. He asked where it hurt and when I told him, he said that side of my pelvis was very tight and he was trying to �pry it loose� with his fingers!! Yikes! But he worked on it for ages and it did start to feel a lot more loose. He also pulled and stretched my arms and shoulders from my back a lot, and moved my head and neck around a lot, and he pulled my arms up over my head and said to breathe in as he pulled them up, and out when he lowered them down. After he did that a few times, he said I breathe very shallow, and I never really thought about it before but I guess I really do breathe shallow. He said I need to start doing specific exercises of deep breathing, taking my breaths almost down to my pelvis (!), to start to allow my ribcage to expand and give the baby more room up the top, which will lessen the pressure on my pelvis. He said the baby is crammed up against my pubic bone at the moment!
Arthur didn�t seem to mind the session. He wiggled a bit here and there, but seemed quite calm and I didn�t feel like he was agitated by any of the movements. He was mostly quiet, even though things were being moved around near him a lot. He did seem to be lulled to sleep by the car journey, which was sweet! He was very kicky when we started out in the car, but when we got on to the motorway he went all quiet and didn�t kick or squirm again till we got onto the residential roads near Quentin�s house. Maybe he�s going to be a little one who falls asleep on car journeys? Aww, that�s so sweet to think about! :)
Anyway then Quentin asked me if I had any breathing problems. I said no, but mentioned my noggin because it is starting to make breathing difficult at night as my nose feels completely blocked and it distracts me and keeps me awake sometimes. He was intrigued about my noggin! I told him I was being referred to an ENT specialist about it. He asked where it was and put his finger and thumb either side of the bridge of my nose and pressed down on it! Yikes!! I was kind of nervous in case he did something to it, as I was lying on my back. When he let go I immediately felt warm liquid running down my throat (sorry, very gross!) so I panicked and said I wanted to lie on my side so it wouldn�t drain down my throat. I sort of hoped he had burst it or something, because at least then it would be gone! But nope. When I turned on my side and waited for the flow to roll forward instead of backwards, I discovered it was blood, and quite a lot of it. Tsk!! Stoopid stoopid bleeding noggin!!!! It bled the whole of the rest of the session, and I was kind of panicky because I knew I had swallowed a fair bit of it already and I was scared it would make me sick. Neil explained that I had a fear of being sick, and Quentin gave me plenty of space and a wad of tissues for my nose. When it eased off a bit, he carried on with more stretchy movements on me, mostly on my sides, but a few more on my back. There was one that was almost scary � he explained that it might worry me beforehand, but that it would not hurt or anything. He said I had to hold my arms up by my head, and take a deep breath in, then as I exhaled he was going to push down with �a lot of pressure� on my chest, and that I might hear some cracking (!!!!), but not to worry about it! So the first time my whole back and chest went CRACKLE!! And the second time. The third time there was no sound at all, and he was happy with that. Weird!
Afterwards I asked him what should happen next. He recommended that I go back in a week, and after that go every 2 weeks until the birth. He said he can keep my pelvis as straight and loose as possible for the birth, but that by 30 weeks of pregnancy there isn�t really enough time to �fix� a really wonky back or pelvis in time for the birth, and with the restrictions of a huge belly. I do believe my symptoms would get markedly worse if I didn�t keep having treatment, as I have a misalignment for sure and the increasing pressure and strain of pregnancy is going to make that misalignment give me more and more pain. So I am happy to keep going, even if it does not completely fix my pain. I hope it will at least ease it though. I asked him if I should be avoiding aquanatal classes, and he said yes, definitely :( I�m kind of sad about that because I love the classes and really enjoy being in the water, etc. I asked if there was any exercise I could do, and he said he would not recommend any type of exercise for me for the rest of my pregnancy � aaargh, but my spreading butt and hips!!!!! He did say the one thing I could do was that exercise where you get on your hands and knees and arch your spine. He said that would be a good one for me, and it would not aggravate my pain or twist my spine, etc. He said I need to be careful when I move to always stand symmetrically where possible, and to always balance weights on both sides, like have a bag over both shoulders, or carry similar weights of shopping in both hands instead of hauling one heavy bag in one hand. He said I just need to minimize further twisting of my spine by keeping things symmetrical, and also I really need to regularly practice those deep-breathing exercises for my ribs.
So that is how my appointment went. My nose bled a little all the way home, but I was soooo disappointed to find that my stupid noggin is just as huge and horrible as ever when I got home and looked at it. I am really starting to be distracted and aggravated by it now, as it�s getting bigger all the time and starting to press out the whole of my nostril. It doesn�t hurt, surprisingly enough, but it keeps me awake at night and bothers me a lot during the day. I really really hope that I get an appointment with an ENT specialist soon. I am still using this cream till Tuesday but it�s not doing anything.
Tonight I am doing okay. I am really tired. I slept really badly last night, mostly due to my noggin but also my pubic bone pain was particularly bad in the night when I tried to change position so that woke me up more than I usually do. I slept in this morning quite late, but I just feel so tired all the time anyway, even an hour or so after I get up. My pelvis still hurts in all the usual places, and my ribcage hurts this evening too, but yeah, I hope that my treatments at least maintain it so that it doesn�t get any worse, but hopefully things will start to improve.
I listened to Arthur hiccupping with the stethoscope this afternoon! He has had hiccups 3 times today, and once in the night when I was doing a pee (!), but those ones didn�t last long. He always wiggles like crazy when I do a pee. I am getting so used to the sensation that I think I�m going to miss it when he is born and my pees are all lonely and quiet again! :( Anyway his hiccups just sounded like little jerky thumps against the stethoscope. But guess what?!! I finally heard his heart beating with the stethoscope!! It was so faint and distant that I wasn�t sure at first, and it seemed to be way too fast for a heartbeat. But I put the stethoscope down and immediately used the doppler on the same spot, and sure enough his heart was right underneath, beating loud and clear at the speed I had heard through the stethoscope. It just sounds way faster through the stethoscope because you hear both beats of the heart with it, rather than the one thump with the doppler. That�s how I know his head is the other way round to where it normally is today (apart from feeling kicks in a different place and having a hard lump on that side!), because his heart was beating over on my right side, and I found his umbilical cord whooshing on the left, so from that I could tell that his chest was to the right and his tummy to the left.
I�m sure I must have more to say but my ribs ache like crazy now (they don�t seem to like this lazy slumped position now I�ve been straightened out a bit by the osteopath!), and I am too hot so I am starting to forget what I wanted to say and I just want to eat a large pile of chocolate raisins (which I don�t have!) and go and cool off in front of the fan. I actually replied to an email today!!! (shock, horror!!) So maybe I will finally get to doing some emails soon! I will have to cancel my aquanatal classes :( I am so sad about that. Ooh I�m 30 weeks now, that means we can order the birth pool!!! We decided to wait till 30 weeks before ordering it (for some reason), and now that time is here!!! I can�t believe how close the birth is getting, and I just know the next 10 weeks will disappear like the last 30 have, even if time seems to slow down, it will still pass. It feels toooo surreal to actually HAPPEN, but I know it really will, and I will really give birth (wow!) and really really be a mummy and have my little boy named Arthur Cameron. It�s just too amazing. I can�t believe it�s really happening. Wow.
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