7 weeks to go!

Had my doctors appointment yesterday – will start with Baby is fine and I am fine.  After running through our normal routine of things to check, when my doctor got to listening to the heartbeat, let’s just say there was a little concern that it was staying at 190bpm (typical fetal heartbeats are 140-170bpm). 

Just to be safe, I was then taken to a different room where they hooked me up to a fetal heart monitor that showed the baby’s heartbeat, when it moved, and if I was having contractions.  Just to be on the safe side, they wanted to monitor me for about 20 minutes to get the pattern of heart rates the baby produced.  Apparently when the baby moves it causes the heart rate to increase above the normal range above … typically to the 180-190bpm range.

While I was sitting there watching the baby’s heart rate essentially stay between 180 and at times hitting 200, the amount of movement was crazy and a 200bpm is disconcerting to see.  Every time the baby moved, there was a little black mark – at one point there was an entire long black line showing consistent movement.  The nurse that was administering the test kept looking at it and I finally asked if this kind of movement was normal, to which she replied, "Uhhh, no."  So of course this is where my mind really took off, wondering what this meant or indicated.

Twenty minutes quickly turned into closer to forty and I sat there wondering if I was going to be admitted to the hospital that day.  My doctor came in to check me again and brought the on-call doctor with him (my doc was leaving for the day) and they both took a look at what was going on.  Thankfully over the course of the last 5-10 minutes, the baby’s heart rate had returned down to the 150-170 range as a baseline.  Both doctors said I could go, that I just had an active period.  My doctor said he would see me at my next appointment in two weeks and there was nothing to worry about.

So flood of relief that the baby is okay, but what the heck?  Is this an indicator of something else with the heart?  Or am I going to be run ragged chasing around an active kid??  I will feel a lot better after my next appointment when hopefully the heart rate will be normal and this was just a little active spot.  Though when I think about it, the baby does move a bit – I just have nothing to compare it to!  And the doctor kept reiterating that lots of movement is a good sign of health for the baby.

So we are now at 33 weeks and the baby is a little over 4lbs and just passed the 17-inch mark.  Here I thought I was just feeling the baby move more because it was getting bigger, not because we had the Tasmanian devil whirring around in me!  Below is a photo of how much I have grown over the last month…