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2009-06-16 - 11.29pm��previous entry��next entry
36 weeks, 6 days - nearly full-term!!!
Nearly there, nearly there, nearly there!!!! It's getting so exciting! I mean, there are still weeks till my due date, and let's face it, I'm likely to go beyond that, but STILL! Tomorrow I reach full-term - my little man is fully cooked! ;) It amazes me that I'm at this stage of pregnancy already!
I'm naughtily updating here while the boys are playing trains in the other room and Nathan naps (or makes growling noises in his cot and has hiccups, instead of actually napping as yet!), when normally I have a rule that I don't even switch the laptop on during the day when the boys are up. They are playing really happily and I'm at the kitchen table so it's okay for now, but I think I will have to go all of a sudden at some point soon. Thankfully Blogger will save this as I go along and I'll be able to just pick it up later.
I keep wanting to update but not having the chance, and tonight Heather (my doula) is coming round to chat and pray for me, after the boys are asleep, so I won't get chance to update tonight I don't think. We usually chat for a couple of hours so then I'll be tired out and ready for bed!
I'm so tiiiiiired lately! My night sleep isn't too bad, about 5 or 6 or so hours with a couple of wakings. That sounds pretty bad now that I read it back, haha! But it has been the norm for such a long time with little ones who only start to sleep through just before another baby is born. The boys are all fully adjusted to sleeping together in their shared bedroom, and Neil is still in there for now too. This means if any of them wake in the night, he deals with them. This is just the way it works best for us, having babies frequently and lots of little ones close together who still wake now and then at night. Neil sleeps with them, and attends to their needs, and I do all the night-wakings with the tiny baby due to having the appropriate equipment! ;) I will get waaaay too little sleep in a short while, so I'm hoping to sleep better for these last few weeks to prepare. I have to get up to go to the loo a couple of times each night so it's not the unbroken night's sleep I've been longing for since before having children!! But it works. And my body is used to it, for better or worse.
So my appointment at the hospital antenatal clinic on Friday went okay. I didn't see a consultant after all, but a very nice registrar and an even more junior doctor who took all my basic stats and so on before the reg saw me. She was very nice too. They kept saying how lovely it was to see someone who is actually HAPPY to be pregnant at that clinic! The registrar said that every pregnant woman who goes there moans, complains or cries about being pregnant, and wants them to do something about it!! Yikes! I suppose it's a clinic for pregnant women who have some sort of reason to be there, like, not a normal antental check-up clinic, so that makes a difference. But still, I found that really sad. They asked how many babies I was going to have, and I said as many as my husband will let me, hehe! I'm quite serious, as you know! I told them I love being pregnant - it's fantastic! I'm blessed to have pretty straight-forward pregnancies though, just the usual morning sickness and the annoyance of bleeding, but that's it really. This particular pregnancy has been the smoothest so far out of all of them I think, and that's a lovely blessing! I know women who have found their 4th pregnancies really hard on their bodies, and I'm relieved to have found that's not the case for me. And surprised that it has been easier than pregnancies 1, 2 and 3 when it seemed likely that it would become more tiring or difficult the more times my body had been through it already!
So anyway, the appointment. Well, they wouldn't even look at the cyst. They asked me where it was and when I told them, they said, "Oh, we wouldn't touch that now! It will probably pop during delivery." And that was that! Oh well. It's uncomfy but not too bad. I really really really hope it just shrinks and goes away all by itself in the meantime. If I have GBS that I'm wondering if a popped cyst will have a tendency to get a GBS infection and cause me much more bother...
Re. the homebirth thing, the doctor asked me where I was having my baby. I said I was planning a homebirth, but that I was waiting on my GBS status. She said she would look it up right away, although I had only had it done a couple of days before and it takes a week for the results to come through. On the hospital computer it had a record of the test but nothing written by it. So she said maybe that meant it was negative. Oh how I hoped she was right! She said just to be sure, she would call the lab right then and there, and find out. When she did, they had to go and look it up because they hadn't realised I was pregnant (?!) and they don't automatically put GBS status on a lab report unless the patient is pregnant (can't think why not though?!). Anyway there was a pause while I waited with baited (hopeful!) breath, and then the doctor who had the phone to her ear said, "Ohh, she IS GBS positive...." Bummer. So, I am, and there it is. I got my private swabs in the post, ironically when I returned from my appointment! But I'm not sure about using them now because an NHS positive result is 84% accurate for GBS status at the birth, and the private tests are 87% accurate if positive. So it won't make much difference and I would have to pay for the private test of course.
The doctor was so nice and business-like that I'm not really sure what happened next! She put the phone down, and said, "I'm sorry sweetheart. Come and have your baby in the midwife-led unit here - we're all very nice!" and I said, "Um, okay!" (without really thinking about it) and she quickly wrote in my notes "Will have hospital birth" and smiled and said nice things about my attitude to pregnancy, and showed me out the door! I was left kind of reeling in the waiting room, lol! I was a bit deflated about it to be honest, and the rest of that day I couldn't get my head to think about what to do, or what I felt, or what I wanted. I did re-read the entire GBS Suppport website again (link last entry) that afternoon while the boys played and Nathan napped. I would have waited till evening but it was really distracting me and I thought it would be good to do some reading on the stats and outcomes and risks and treatments, and so on and so on, just to get them fresh in my head with the new perspective (the fact that I definitely am carrying GBS). It was helpful, I think.
I did come to the conclusion that however tiny the risk to Benjamin, I would not cope well if he turned out to be that one baby who DID develop GBS disease and die from it. Even if he developed it and made a full recovery, I would still struggle with that reality probably for ever, because I knew about my status and chose not to protect him. So that made me realise that I do need to do what I can to protect him - that has to be my personal choice.
That means a hospital birth, OR some sort of rather radical alternative at home, which my hospital and midwives won't support. Urgh. I emailed all my thoughts to my doula, who has been really helpful since. She was at the hospital that very afternoon helping somebody establish breastfeeding, and went to see the Supervisor of Midwives and talked to her about me. The S of M said that she is happy to communicate with Heather's midwife friend in Cambridge about the intramuscular antibiotics at home!! Wow. So, Heather will set that up and see what they say. Heather also said that it might be a good idea for me to meet with either the S of M or the Deputy Head of Midwifery at the hospital, armed with research on IM antibiotics during labour (there's a small study where pregnant women carrying GBS were given one large injection of IM antibiotics late in pregnancy, and this effectively eradicated GBS for up to 6 weeks! The downside is it's a painful injection). Heather knows them both and is on good terms with them, so can arrange this for me if need be. It makes me a bit nervous! But at least it sounds like there just might be an option. I think if I could have IM antibiotics I would happily relax and have my homebirth without stressing about the GBS any longer.
I will update here about that as it goes along! No plans to meet with anyone yet, except that Heather is coming round tonight to discuss it all and pray. I told her that I am struggling to feel God's presence when I pray at the moment, and am starting to feel slightly frantic about finding him when I pray, because I know I NEED to cling to him during labour itself and I'm worried I won't be able to! I am also starting to have the odd bad dream about labour and birth. *sigh* So she wants to come and pray with me - how wonderful! :)
I really want to be starting perineal massage by now, but I'm squeamish/nervous about the cyst in the way and whether I'll even be able to. I also have my red raspberry leaf tea but the weather is so hot that I don't want to drink it! I seem to be dealing better with the hot and humid weather than I usually do, which is quite something for me, especially whilst hugely pregnant. So that's good! It IS too hot for me though. I am sweating way too much and finding it hard to keep cool, but thankfully there is generally a breeze with the hot weather, AND hotter days are interspersed with rainy cooler ones (I love this!). We even had a cracking thunderstorm yesterday just before the boys' bedtime! They were most impressed! :)
Okay it is now after 11pm and I wish I had posted what I'd written as an entry of its own earlier in the day! Tsk. Oh well. Heather has been round and spent almost two hours here. We talked for maybe the first 45 minutes and then spent the rest of that time praying - it was AWESOME!!!! I am just amazed at God's provision, with Heather. Just amazed. She is so completely on our wavelength in terms of exactly what we believe, how we do stuff, etc, in our walk with God. I emailed her my birth stories, copied and pasted from this diary, and she had read them all in preparation for this evening and said they gave her good insight into some anxieties I have, and things we should pray about. She laid hands on me and prayed, and we broke curses spoken over me that may interfere with the birth, or which have become strongholds. She's so excited to have a Christian client who is happy for her to pray like this! :) We prayed into the source of the fear I have from transition to after the baby is born (from the last two births), and asked God to reveal that to me. I want to pray about that some more because I felt that there was a definite "something" that wasn't nice to think about, but I don't really clearly know what it is. I'm slightly not too thrilled about delving into it more because I *think* it has to do with sexual abuse as a child, ugh. But God wants that revealed and dealt with, and to see me free of it, and I love him for it! I want to be free of something tying me down to pain and panic too, so I will pray more.
Heather laid her hands on my tummy and prayed over Benjamin, which was soooooo lovely! And some of the declarations from the 'Supernatural Childbirth' book, which she has also asked Neil to read for "homework" - yay! He never reads books that are about stuff we need to read about! Or any books really. So I love that she's specifically asked him to read it. She has ordered the Prayers and Promises book that has recently been published that goes along with it, and is going to print out a lot of helpful prayers and Bible verses for me to stick around the house! I love my doula! I love my God way more, because he has totally designed this.
As a result of the prayer time, I now feel way different about giving birth. Waaaay different. I have so much to write about it, but it's so late and I need to go to bed. I will try to write again really soon to catch up on that, as it's all so relevant! Also I need to make a decision about the antibiotics. We are praying that I will have my baby at home. Also Heather encouraged me to ask God if he would tell me when Benjamin's birthday will be! I love that! :) I can't believe I never thought to do that before! So I will pray about that too. Wouldn't that be so cool?! He has already certainly revealed this baby's name to me, so I guess it's entirely reasonable to expect that he may share Benjamin's birthday with me too. This evening while we prayed, I had a real "ah-HA!" moment as his name came to mind. It suddenly seemed to be a description of what I WANT for his birth, and hopefully prophetic in that sense too (that's what I'm now praying anyway) - Benjamin has a couple of similar meanings, one of which is "son of strength", and Isaac means "laughter". I want to know God's strength poured into me during my labour and to display that too throughout the process. Also I want a JOYFUL birth! I want to be able to laugh and cherish it and experience it, not just get it over and done with, fear it, or just "bear" it. I want to enjoy it. So I'm excited all over again about his name, which God has chosen in the first place! :)
Okay, that is all for tonight! I am feeling really upbeat, and so much closer to God than I have felt for a long time. I just spent a good while singing and worshipping after Neil left to drop Heather home this evening. It was wonderful! :)
I'm excited to be 37 weeks in the morning! Yay! Neil has nearly finished handing over work to his team and other colleagues so that at any point he can start paternity leave, and that is a big relief for him, and for me as well. His workload should start decreasing now too, which is another relief, since he's been working evenings and weekends MOST weeks since January! Soooo glad!
Back soon!
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