Being me, I had steeled myself for a meh appointment. Perhaps Dr. H would be *okay* - maybe she'd listen to me, but maybe she'd push back on my being concerned about MTHFR, and incompetent cervix, and my generally waiting to fall into a cavern of doom.
Wow, I love being wrong (sometimes). Dr. H met with me for a full hour. We talked in detail about my convoluted history (and she was rather impressed with my surgery/miscarriage/event date recall abilities, thank you very much). She asked me about my first childbirth. She asked me about my daughter. She smiled and laughed and joked and commiserated about breastfeeding around male colleagues, and was by every measure a normal woman (in other words, I don't think she'd be cracking jokes at my D&C the way my first OB did back in 2012).
She performed a full exam and then proceeded to move on to the doppler. And boy, was she worried along with me when it took her a minute to find a heartbeat on this little kumquat. "I really hope we find this, I would hate to send you out of here in a panic," she said. "I would just beg you for a requisition for an ultrasound," I responded. "And I would write it for you," she replied.
But finally (!) there it was, the sound of galloping horses. 170bpm. We both smiled and breathed again. I noted while lying on the table that the only way I can handle this pregnancy is to take it week by week, to get through each benchmark and live to see another day and think about the next week. She nodded and smiled and said that was the right approach.
The rest of the visit was a discussion about my next steps: The Panorama Screen, the CVS is there's a problem with it, the nuchal translucency scan, and then I enter the second trimester. No, I'm not crazy if I still want to top off the panorama with an amnio, and the doctors who perform amnio at this hospital ONLY perform amnios, so they are the best. No, I am not crazy to want to get my cervical length checks started a little earlier, we can start at 16 weeks. Yes, I should absolutely keep teaching zumba classes.
And then the moment when I think I knew I would be the wandering patient no longer: the MTHFR discussion. Dr. H was fine with my supplementing with a baby aspirin. My manner of speaking (I can pull lawyerly authority out of my ass when necessary) apparently convinced her I wasn't a wackjob pulling insanity off of the interwebs (ha!), and she believed that my supplementing with the super-disgusting methylated natural vitamins was reasonable. So much so, that she plans to do a little more research on my homozygous MTHFR mutation AND plans on asking an MFM she knows whether she has any thoughts. And the MFM she is going to talk to? YES, the same woman whose office I attempted to call a few weeks ago. How awesome is that?
We live to see another week.
*According to the exotic fruit loving minds over at babycenter, at 10 weeks pregnant "Your baby now weighs less than a quarter of an ounce and is a little over 1 inch long from head to bottom," and "is the size of a Kumquat." And fuck if I didn't have to go and look up what a kumquat actually looked like.
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