First Ultrasound

I had my first OBGYN appointment and ultrasound yesterday, Tuesday, June 22, 2010.

This was very cool and very weird for me all at the same time.

Troy was actually able to come with me and see our baby for the first time and meet the doctor and all that...

Not cool because if you've never had a baby before, you don't really know what to expect at this first appointment, let me tell you it was long!

Here's how it really went down...

We get there to suite 200B, where they told me to go when i scheduled my appointment, but apparently this was the wrong place because they wanted to do my ultrasound first so they sent us down the hall to suite 200C. Once we were there, almost immediately they were ready for us in the room with the ultrasound machine. Because it's still so early they had to do a Vaginal Ultrasound luckily i had been doing some reading and was expecting this, or it would have been a bit of an awkward surprise. Basically the doctor/nurse has the patient lay on a table with her feet up in stirrups and inserts a probe covered with a condom and gel into the patient's vagina. The probe sends out soundwaves that basically bounce off of the baby and reflect a picture on to a TV screen which allows us to see what the baby looks like.

On the screen in front of me we could see the typical ultrasound picture that we're already used to seeing. It was really crazy though because that's OUR baby in this picture! To the untrained eye it just looked like a blob up there on the screen. According to the doctor our little baby was quite a wiggle worm (which is a good thing) so she was having trouble getting the view she needed to get to see whatever she needed to see. To Troy and I the blob looked the same no matter how the Dr moved it around. Finally she says "let me try something else here..." and moves the probe around a little and then stops. I guess she finally got the angle she needed because she froze the screen for a second then explained to us that toward the end on the left is the tip of the head and the end on the right is the tip of the spine. ... Still looked like the same blob to us. She even showed us the heart beat. Very faintly we were able to see a little spot moving up and down, just like a heart beat. It was very cool!! The baby was a lot bigger then i was expecting it to be. It was awesome! It made it feel so real.

Troy and I find it humorous that the doctor is able to tell anything from this. To us it just looks like a blob in there, no features of any kind to speak of. I can't wait 'til it starts to really look like a baby!


After this we were sent back over to suite 200B to meet the "real" Doctor. Here they took my blood pressure (125/70 that means nothing to me but she said it was really good), weighed me and gave an extensive questionnaire. The nurse asked me about a million questions about my health history, my family health history, and Troy's family health history. She asked about any symptoms I've been having... which actually all that's happened so far is nausea in the morning and every time I get hungry. I haven't been sick at all, and as long as I eat something, most of the time my nausea goes away almost immediately. Other then that, I've been extremely fatigued and the easiest physical tasks make me feel so tired out! Oh, and I'm hungry every couple hours.


After this we were finally able to meet our doctor. She was so cute! She was extremely and obviously excited about meeting us and getting to help us with our first baby. She made me feel like I was the only person she knew having a baby. It was really sweet :-) She gave us a lot of information, very quickly. It was a bit of an info overload, thank goodness she gave us lots of pamphlets and print outs that re-state all the info she gave us. She asked us when we got married and if we were trying to have the baby and talked to us about what to do since Troy will be deploying part way through the pregnancy she even said she wanted to know when he was leaving because she likes to pray for all her military dads. That was very nice and made us feel good to know.
During our conversing she wanted to do a pap smear and a breast exam. This is something that I should have had done a long long time ago, I'd been putting it off and putting it off and embarrassingly I must admit I'd never had a pap smear before. I tend to be very comfortable when doctors have to do weird, sometimes embarrassing things like that. I have it in my head that it's their job, they're suppose to do it, its to help me and in this case to help our baby. If you've had a pap smear before this is all old news and no big deal, but to those that haven't ... it does feel slightly uncomfortable. It was kinda funny because she's doing this while talking to me about this and that, like it's just no big deal

Once we did a little more talking, got a little more info we were free to leave to go get blood tests done. This part was great because there was a little misunderstanding between me and the doctor. I thought she had told me to get dressed and wait in the room, but she had thought she told me that I could leave to go to suite 200C again for the screening. So Troy and I were in the room for a good extra five minutes or so, when he finally had to use the bathroom, so we decided to head out and try to find one. Our nurse was out there and was like, "oh you guys ARE still in there!" so I explained to her what we thought and we all laughed because she thought we were just taking extra time talking about something or taking a long time to get dressed.

Finally we headed for 200C to do the blood screening. This is so they can check for all kinds of things like protein levels and hormone levels which if abnormal could mean chromosome abnormalities. They also will use it for an HIV test. This was freaky for me because it really makes me nauseous thinking about them taking blood out of my body with that needle stuck in my arm. It's pretty freaky. So of course i didn't look while she was doing it. Troy, the macho man that he is, watched the whole thing but was kinda surprised by how much they actually took. If i remember right, they'll have to take my blood at many, if not all of my up coming appointments. They said if they don't call me, everythingsfine. So as my mom said, "no news is good news." Hopefully they won't call!

After that was a quick urine sample, then going to the front desk to schedule the next appointment for 4 weeks from now. At this next appointment they'll do some more screening and we should be able to hear the baby's heart beat! I'm very excited about that! I think at that point the ultrasound will show a little more then a blob, it might start looking like a baby to the untrained eye.
It is going to be really weird, from now up until i think it was about 28weeks ill have to go to the Doctor once a month, after that every two weeks, then even more often once it's closer to being born. It's weird that i'll be spending so much time at the Doctor's office. I never go to the Doctor's unless it's some sort of an emergency.
This is all just SO cool!