First Trimester Screening

From the very beginning of my pregnancy with Finn, I felt a deep connection with him.  I felt like I knew him, and could already imagine him as a 2-3 year old.  And much of how I imagined him is exactly how he is now.  That wonderful bond we shared when I was pregnant was one of the main reasons I loved being pregnant.  Even before I could feel him move, I felt him there.

This pregnancy has been much different.  I just haven't felt a connection with Chimi.  That's not to say that I'm not already attached to this baby, it's just that I haven't felt the same deep connection I felt with Finn.  I think a large part of it was the way Chimi was conceived...I took some hormones to prepare my lining and then walked in to a clinic, had a catheter slipped inside and one little embryo transferred...while the process was actually much more complicated, it still felt so much simpler and less involved than my injectable IUI cycle with Finn.  It's just been hard to believe that I'm pregnant.  It's all been so easy that a part of me is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I read the RBA threads frequently (when I should be studying) just to reassure myself that women who have traveled a lot longer roads than I were able to get their happily ever after with the same simple visit to RBA, and maybe, just maybe, there isn't another shoe that is going to drop.

Another big part is how sick I've felt.  There are plenty of women who feel worse than I have, I know.  But I'm still miserable.  The first few weeks it was reassuring.  But now, going on 8 weeks of some level of pretty constant nausea, it's just exhausting and awful.  I have an hour or two of relatively no nausea first thing in the morning, and then it just builds throughout the course of the day.  It reminds me of how I feel with a stomach bug, right before I finally give in and throw up for the first time.  Always on the verge of throwing up.  I'm hungry, but nothing sounds good.  I want to eat healthy food, but all I can stomach are the bland carbs that I'm growing to despise.  After a few days of feeling a little better, this past weekend was just horrible.  I was so miserable by the end of each day that I actually cried myself to sleep a couple of nights in a row.  And that's with taking Zofran.  That awfulness from the weekend and Monday and Tuesday seems a little better today, so I'm really hoping that was the worst of the worst.  (If not, I might brave the fatigue and try adding some Unisom, as suggested by JustAnotherJenny based on this post from Bionic Mamas.)

If you're still with me, there's a point to all this complaining.  And that point starts this morning, when I walked into the ultrasound room at my MFM's office.  Joanne (who I've known for 9 years - for about 4 months I shared office space with the MFM) is the RN who does the first trimester screening, and she was thrilled to tell me that I was their first patient on their brand new ultrasound machine.  Which meant that we were going to have to spend more time on the ultrasound, since it was going to take her a while to figure it all out.

The warm jelly squished onto my tummy as I tried to contain my anxiety.  This was my first scan since I stopped all my hormones, and I was nervous.  I've been trying to imagine Chimi wiggling around in there, but I've just not been able to visualize it.  Like I said before, it just doesn't seem real.

And then the probe was in place, and suddenly I could see the baby.  MY baby.  Wiggling and jiggling all over the screen.  When it did its first backflip, I felt a little twist in my heart.  There it is. There's my child.  There's that connection.  It's different than with Finn...this may sound really new age, but I've always felt like I've known Finn forever.  If there's such a thing as past lives, we've been together before.  But this little one?  I think we're new to each other.  I don't know this child, but my heart is smitten.  We watched Chimi twist and turn and do somersaults, before finally cooperating with the exam, and holding still for the nuchal translucency measurements, and then posing for a few pictures.  The new ultrasound machine was amazing, the images were so clear - we could see the ventricles of the heart, the kidneys, the brain - so amazing that 10 weeks ago it was just a circle of cells.  The pictures didn't come out as clear, unfortunately, but I still have the image of that beautiful, squirmy child in my head and I'm holding it close.

I still feel horrible.  I'm still really ready to be done feeling so sick.  I'm still really ready to get my 800 calories at lunch from a burger instead of a damned baked potato.  But now I also feel some excitement and joy in this pregnancy, too.

We tried to get a look at gender today, but the little stinker had the umbilical cord between its legs the entire time.  Until my last ultrasound I had decided this baby was a girl, but now I have no idea.  I guess I'm just going to have to wait until my anatomy scan on August 27th.  Four long weeks.  Four weeks that will hopefully be filled with joyful anticipation, instead of resentful nausea.