38th Week in Review

I got bored of posting every tiny detail every time I had a monitoring appointment, so I figured unless something changed drastically I'd wait and review both of the week's appointments at once.

On Monday, I asked the doctor "should I schedule any monitoring appointments past my due date?" and she said "nope, you'll have a baby by then!" and sent me off to get another just-in-case preeclampsia lab done. I didn't really ask any followup questions because I was caught off guard by that, and needed some time to process. So for the next three days I wandered through mixed feelings of being so close to D-day and overthinking about whether the doctor was thinking I was medically in need of induction, or if she was only looking at my office-visit blood pressure, or if she just knew something I didn't.

Today I feel much better! Cory came with me, and when the doctor came in I was ready with questions.

First, I asked about the weird sensations I've been getting in my right leg, which I'm not sure I've mentioned here. For a little over a week, I have had periodic upper-inner thigh (way up by my groin) pain, that kind of feels like a muscle spasm. It happens when I'm standing up, and I've been noticing it mostly in the evenings though it doesn't happen all the time. I made the mistake of reading an online forum about it, where most people said it was ligament pain and one doom-and-gloom-er said it was probably a blood clot and it should be checked out. The doctor said it was probably a ligament thing, but could also be contractions radiating down into my leg. She said it's probably exacerbated by the baby putting pressure on that side, which makes sense because her body is on my right side.

Then I asked what her plans were for this delivery. "Well, you're in a gray zone," she said, "where you're 35 and have chronic hypertension, but on the other hand your labs look good. We know that for first-time moms, when we induce it takes a long time and it is more likely to lead to a c-section, and we don't want to do that, so at this point as long as your blood pressure doesn't spike we can let you go to 41 weeks." Phew.

She did recommend trying a membrane sweep, since I'm strep b negative and it would be a more natural way to try to jump-start labor, so I went ahead and consented to that. She checked my cervix, and I'm at 70% effaced and 1cm, with an anterior-pointing cervix and "her head is down there" (she didn't say what station I was). I was kind of hoping to be a little further along than that, but I know it's my first and left to my own devices I'm almost certain I'd go over my due date. The check itself was slightly painful and of course the sweep was worse, but it was just a few seconds and that was it. She's going to do it again on Monday, and in the meantime I'll be re-researching at-home labor induction methods (though I've read that most of them don't really work - at least I can feel like I'm doing something). All the doctors in the practice discuss their high-risk patients at a roundtable on Tuesdays, so by next Thursday she may have something more definitive.