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2004-04-30 - 4.15pm��previous entry��next entry
13 weeks - Been for my scan!!!
Woohoooooo I had my scan!!!!!!
I am 13 weeks pregnant today and I had my scan at LAST - it felt like forever waiting for it recently!
Well yes, I will get on with it! The scan went wonderfully. Bean is looking healthy and normal and fine. He/she measures exactly on target, at 13 weeks, 0 days! Yay for Bean!! I'm so glad she/he caught up those 3 days from the previous scans. And super glad because it means my "official" due date (which I know from charting at FF) stays the same! Yay!
I have the most beautiful picture to show you. I am going to post it here twice because I made a copy where I wrote labels (rather clumsily!) to show you the leg, mouth, nose and ear, just incase you don't automatically spot those beautiful features on my lovely baby! :) But I thought I'd post an unlabelled picture too since all that writing gets in the way otherwise.
So here they are:
Isn't it a beautifully clear profile of the face for a scan this early?! I am so thrilled. I've seen so many scan pics from people in my November due dates groups online, and they all look like grainy blobs where you can just about tell which end is the head. Maybe it's because I am 13 weeks and most of them had theirs between 10 and 12? Or maybe my womb being high and all that?
Anyway there is only one baby which is a relief - not that I'd mind twins, but I'd prefer to focus on each of my children in turn for the age they're at, y'know?
We opted for the Nuchal Fold Test which gives us an indication of the risk of Down Syndrome. It took the sonographer ages to measure Bean's nuchal fold because she/he was lifting his/her chin constantly, so the fold of skin at the back of the neck (the nuchal fold) was constantly moving! You can actually see the nuchal fold in the picture - it's that black space between the two white lines along the back and the back of the neck. The blackness is fluid, and a possible indication of Down Syndrome is if there is excess fluid in that space, causing a wider measurement. Anyway she took the measurements and said it was normal and that makes the chance of Bean having Down Syndrome very low. With my age alone, my risk of having a Down Syndrome baby is apparantly 1:726, but after the nuchal fold test it went down to 1:1818, so that's good. They say anything higher than 1:300 is worth investigating further, so we don't have to worry at all.
And now, about Bean. How WONDERFUL it was to actually see Bean, in action! I could have watched all day and then some, and the scan seemed way too short in duration. I think it must have lasted 5 or 10 minutes in total, but a good half of that was taken getting the nuchal fold measurements which didn't show us much of the baby at all.
I expected to see Bean moving like crazy, perhaps kicking or punching a lot. I was craning my neck for the first glimpse of my baby on the screen as the scan started, and we saw him/her fairly quickly. The first thing we thought was - WOW, it's so huuuge!! Bean just looked soooo big compared with last time (which, obviously he/she is!). I can never figure out if scans show you what way up the baby is, but from what we saw it seemed like the baby was lying on its back, knees up and feet pressed against the top right curve of the womb - which you can't really see in the picture but that's where it is. You can just see Bean's thigh and maybe juuuust about make out the knee as it bends back down to the right.
Anyway the sonographer said she would take us through the baby's basic anatomy, and she flipped the image so that we were looking down at Bean's head from like a birdseye view. We could see the frame of the skull and the brain really clearly. Then she went through the body in a cross section, and we saw Bean's stomach, heart (beating away), umbilical cord joining the tummy, and the pelvis. We could see little hands - sooooo amazing, because they are PERFECTLY formed, you can see all the tiny bones in them and everything. They were just floating out in the fluid and had that slightly curved-over look to the fingers that you get when you just let your hands float in the bath. It was so so so so amazing to see such detail on our OWN child - I can't even believe it's happening and I keep wanting to pinch myself!
At the pelvis, as the sonographer rotated the image we looked up from underneath Bean. Bean had his/her legs open and I asked if 13 weeks was definitely too early to tell the baby's sex. The sonographer hesitated and said they didn't "like" to say at that stage, even though it is possible to tell. She said they don't normally do that at the earlier scans, but she zoomed in on the genital area while she said all this anyway, but said they don't like to "say". She didn't say anything about what she saw (or didn't see) but after a moment she just moved the scanner out to see the profile again, but I have seen a zillion ultrasounds of baby genitals online and I personally thought it was fairly easy to spot.... boy parts! What?!! But, but... my girl vibes!! And afterwards when I was talking to Neil about the ultrasound, he said he wondered if he had seen boy bits when the sonographer zoomed in, and I said that's what I thought too. Neil hasn't seen loads of ultrasound pictures, although I have shown him one or two online of baby boy bits and girl bits. So hmmm. I know it's too early. But actually the genitals ARE discernable one way or the other at 13 weeks, it's just difficult to see on a scan at this early stage. So hmmm. We will really have to wait and see, but I'm gonna have to keep a very neutral mind now that I think I saw boy bits! I have even asked my mum to stop saying "she" when referring to Bean, which she usually does!
Where was I? Oh yes, so after looking at the baby's organs and things, and hearing that they were all looking normal, she zoomed out to give us that profile that you can see in the picture. Occasionally Bean did little jerky movements with his/her arms and legs, but mostly he/she just lay there looking really calm and contented. I was about to ask if the baby might be asleep as it was so still and I'd expected more "action", but right then she zoomed in on the profile of the face, and we could see the little mouth opening and closing!!! The baby lifted its chin every time its mouth opened, and the sonographer said it was swallowing amniotic fluid. It was so amazing to watch. It swallowed for quite a while, opening and closing its mouth, but at quite a slow and casual speed. Then it opened its mouth a little wider and the sonographer laughed and said, "There's a little yawn there!" Soooo sweet! Bean seemed very relaxed in there :) It was swallowing again when the sonographer tried to measure the nuchal fold, that's why she had trouble taking the measurements for a while! This baby sure does love to swallow! The scan photo was taken mid-swallow actually - you can see the little lips looking sort of pursed, but that was literally a freeze-frame between an open mouth right before the picture and another open mouth right after the picture!
You can also see where the heart is on the picture, and the brain. I am soooo pleased with our picture. I haven't let it out of my sight since we got home. Oh and can you see Bean's ear?! It's still a little low, but it's nearly finished moving up to the final position. The ears always start way down on the neck and move up from around 10 weeks.
Also I'm glad about the picture showing the baby's position, because now can you see how if the baby were to stretch out its legs, the head would push up quite a lot against the womb and that would account for the lumps that keep rising up in my abdomen?! I felt that a lot this morning before we went.
And another thing that confirms that I'm feeling the baby turn and stretch already is that after the nuchal fold test, the sonographer went back to an image of the full length of the baby, and right as she switched the image back I felt the same old pushy sensation that I'm getting used to, and the sonographer said, "Oh! The baby just flipped right over!" Ah-ha! So I AM feeling things accurately! Bean had literally flipped from lying on the back to facing down, and all we could see was the little back and the spine.
Anyway the whoooole thing was lovely, I just wish we'd had longer to watch the baby and I would have loved a million more pictures of different things if I could have. Especially the hands. I found them so amazing. I would have loved to show you a picture of Bean's hands.
Anyway after we got the results explained to us and things, we went out and made an appointment for the next scan, which is meant to be around 20 weeks. But because I am late for this scan as it is, most women who are due in November have already been for their scans and therefore booked their follow-ups in the summer, so of course everything was full and I have to have another late scan. Grrr. But oh well. So my "20 week" scan is on July 1st at 2pm, and I will be one day shy of 22 weeks. That's Cameron's birthday too. How I wish I could hop in the car after my scan and take the pictures and the boy/girl news round to his house with his birthday present instead of going to his grave. He would have LOVED to have news like that, and see scan pictures. He would have been thrilled that I am going to have a baby. I miss him.
Well.
But I am so so so happy because I am having a BABY!!!! Really! It's really really happening and I'm going to be a mummy, and I have a real live baby in my tummy growing strong and getting ready to have me feed it and love it and be a parent to it. Wow. My brain is all scrambled at the thought. Neil keeps saying it too - it's really a baby. He keeps saying, "My little one is all pregnant!" I'm his little one, by the way :) But I guess now he has two! He says I'm too much of a little one to be having a baby, and honestly I feel the same a lot of the time! I still feel like I'm a kid or like when I was in my teens. I don't feel "grown up" at all. I'm just me, and I can't believe we are really going to be parents. Gosh.
Well I think that's all the scan news now. I emailed the scan picture to my parents and then phoned them while they looked at it, that was so lovely! They were amazed at how far developed Bean is already.
My cold is evil. I am still hardly sleeping at night and today I am absolutely streaming, and so congested. I can't taste or smell - I had a bath this morning and washed my hair and used deoderant - all things that usually smell strongly at the time, but I couldn't get even a tiny whiff of any of them. Funny how colds have a stage like that, even if your nose is clear. Anyway I'm sure it will clear up eventually. I am hoping SOON because I am feeling awful today.
Nothing more to report on the pregnancy side of things, so I will finish for now. But YAY we've had the scan, and it was so wonderful to see Bean, and oooh I could just go on about it forever probably! I can't wait for the next one!!The next thing to look forward to is my first appointment with the midwife on May 13th, which is just under 2 weeks from now, so that's coming up. Also the chart I've been taking Bean's measurements from each day (an embryology site) stops at 12 weeks and 6 days, so I can no longer look and see what Bean is measuring. Loooads of sites will tell you a baby's length at various stages of pregnancy, but almost NONE of them are accurate. This embryology site (it's an IVF site I think) was spot on to the exact day with the ultrasound measurements I have had at all 3 of my scans so far, so it's a shame I can't use it anymore. I have enjoyed keeping tabs on Bean's size day by day! Today Bean measures 6.8cm from crown to rump apparantly. And is just entering a stage of rapid growth - tripling his/her length over the next month or so.
Well that's all for now. I am going to steam my head and eat again - I am still getting so queasy if I don't eat every couple of hours! Don't you just hate eating when you can't taste a thing and you have to chew with your mouth open because your nose is all stopped up?! Blech. But food.... gotta have fooood....
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