22 weeks and Appointment Recap

I am 22 weeks pregnant today!  I'm still feeling pretty great overall.  My belly is definitely getting bigger and more in the way, but I don't have any other major complaints.  The babies are incredibly active, especially Baby A.  Sometimes I can't tell if they are just moving a lot of if I'm starting to have tightening/braxton hicks contractions.

About the appointment.  It was a bit of a mixed bag.  I have already vented about it to my IPs, my husband, my agency, my mom, and my online surrogacy forum support group.  I'm going to recap it one more time on this blog, and then let it go.  It's not good to have all the bad energy hanging over me while I'm growing these little beauties.

The most important thing we learned at the appointment was that the babies are still looking great.  They are growing just as they should, and all their organs look perfect.  After some prodding from the tech, we were finally able to get Baby B to move into a position where we could get the measurements we needed for his heart.  Baby A was a wild thing in there, and Baby B was much more laid back.  It will be interesting to see if those personalities hold once they are out in the real world!  I forget what the exact estimated weights were, but Baby A was in the 50th percentile and Baby B was in the 60th percentile.  They were able to get some really cute 3D facial shots of both babies for my IPs.

Unfortunately, my cervix check didn't go as well as I was hoping.  It measured in at 2.9 cm (down from over 4 just three weeks ago).  My doctor said that they normally don't start worrying about pre-term labor until it gets down below 2.5, but since it was such a drastic decrease in length from the last measurement they want to increase my monitoring to every two weeks.  So I have a quick transvaginal ultrasound appointment for two weeks from now just to check on the length.  I'm hoping it will hold steady for a while.  Logically I know that there is nothing that I did to decrease my cervical length, but I can't help but worry a little bit that my body is going to let these babies down or that I'm going to get stuck on bed rest for months.  It's not like I've been doing any weight lifting or intense exercise up to this point, and the doctor did not give me any activity restrictions, but I'm going to make sure that I take extra time to relax and put my feet up from here on out.

Other than the cervical length issue, the rest of my checkup went fine.  Normal weight gain and blood pressure, and my belly is currently measuring one week ahead at about 23 weeks (not as bad as I was fearing).

The bad part came at the end of the appointment, when a high-risk Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM) doctor basically barged in at the end and demanded that he supervise a re-scan of the babies.  I'm not sure how he managed to wiggle his way onto my case, since my OB did not invite him and was clearly annoyed that he was there.  So we had to go back and do another ultrasound while he watched what the tech did.  He started rattling off all sorts of defects/complications that we were at an elevated risk for since we not only had an IVF pregnancy, or twins, but BOTH.  After mentioning a life-threatening complication, he would say, "there's about a 1% chance of that."  Um, ok then why are we worrying about it, especially since the scan was not showing any indication that either baby had these problems.  He told us we needed to get an echo on the hearts of the babies with him in 4 weeks (a lowly ultrasound tech is apparently not good enough to spot the heart defects that our IVF babies clearly have despite the fact that everything looks perfect).  Needless to say, my IPs went from being happy and excited to freaked out in 5 minutes flat.

Even worse was the fact that he was completely unprofessional throughout the scan.  He said things like, "Thanks, for being skinny, unlike all my other patients.  It makes it much easier to see things on the ultrasound."  and "well if you can keep Baby A head down you should be on track for a vaginal delivery.  Unless of course your uterus is screwed up some other way."  Since this doctor apparently only works on Thursday afternoons, he made us schedule an ultrasound for four weeks out.  Our OB unfortunately isn't working that afternoon, so then we had to schedule a regular OB appointment with a stranger, which my IPs were extremely unhappy about.

If this were my own pregnancy, I would have told this guy where he could stick his ultrasound wand and called it a day, never thinking about him again.  But I have tried so hard to to find good doctors and give my IPs the most positive pregnancy experience possible, and having this guy waltz in and treat us in such an appalling manner really brought out my mama bear instincts and I have been on a slow burn ever since.  After talking with my IPs we decided that they still would really like to have an echo done just to be on the safe side, but we all agree we should find someone else to do it and make sure we can get an OB appointment with our usual doctor.  In the future, I'm going to try to avoid scheduling any more appointments for Thursdays so we never come across this jerk again.