Week 12 (or 11.5) checkup.

I saw my OB on Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day btw. It was the first time that I met the other practicing dr. from the group. Her name is Dr. Ota and she looks relatively young. I got a good vibe from her and she was very patient with me by answering all my pesky questions. Oh, I also did a glucose test in the morning. They took 6 vials of blood so I'm sure they were used for other tests along with the glucose test. The dr. said that if I don't hear anything back from them regarding the glucose test that the results are normal. So no news is good news in that aspect. She said the baby looks fine and the cervix looked closed. Woo-hoo! She did a culture and I will have to call back on Monday for the results. She said according to what she sees so far that I do not need a cerclage. I also told her that I've been feeling constipated and she recommended milk of magnesia if I'm "clogged up" for more than 2 days. yum. I'm going to see them in 4 weeks.

The following day, I saw my peri. A. decided to take the morning off to come along. That totally helped me out because I had Aria with me. This was the big day where my peri performs the nuchal translucency ultrasound to determine whether or not the baby has down syndrome based on the fold of the baby's neck and the space between the nose. He can also tell us the sex of the baby if we were incline to find out. We decided to know. I was kinda relieved that A. was there because I was a little nervous. I guess my peri was training another dr. on doing the scans so the procedure took longer than my previous experience. She kept on missing certain frames, etc. The also had a hard time getting the baby to move in a certain direction to measure the head and had to resort to tapping my belly repeatedly to get the baby to move. I felt like a test subject at times.
Well, the great news is that the baby does not have downs and looks pretty healthy. Unfortunately we were not able to find out the sex. Remember my earlier post regarding the age of the baby? How my OB measured the baby at 7 weeks while my calculator measured him at 8 weeks? Well, I guess the calculator is off by maybe 4 days and the baby is indeed less than 12 weeks along right now. He or she is maybe 4 days behind in comparison to the calculator. Because of those few days before the 12 weeks mark my peri was not able to determine the sex. I'm going to have to go back in 10 days to find out. I'm okay with that as long as the baby is healthy. Oh, my cervix is measuring nice and long at 3.5 cm. He also said no to a cerclage so far but will monitor my cervix to see if there are any changes that may sway his opinion. We also discussed my taking the P17 shots at 16 weeks. I will not be able to self-administer them so I'm going to either have my friend Kathleen (who's a RN) do it or A. will have to learn to.

Here's a 4-D scan of the baby at 11.5 weeks.