We had a consultation with our high risk obstetrician yesterday - I’ll call her Miss (we’re in the UK surgeons are Mr or Miss) BTDT, because she has - her obstetric history is pretty similar to mine. She was fantastic, it was worth the 2 hours wait (I can’t even begin to go into how awful the waiting room was but it included - junkies, pg teens & their social workers, hundreds of snotty unsupervised kids rampaging around & multitudes of the unwashed British public); she know Mr T, she’s worked with Lesley Reagan & Raj Rai, she understands about pregnancy loss & infertility.
She started off by saying that we probably can’t remember what it is like to have a successful pregnancy (true) and that her aims were to get the baby here safe and well but also to try and protect my mental & emotional well being whatever the outcome. To that end I’ll see her every 4 weeks for the time being, & the midwife in between each appointment. She also happy to send me for scans every 2 weeks for as long as I feel I need it.
We talked about the meds for ages - her feeling is that I should stay on heparin until the birth. I am in a bit of a grey area & if I wanted to stop she’d support me, but she doesn’t believe continuing will do harm whereas stopping may do. The plan at the moment is to continue until 18 weeks & reassess then. I expect that I’ll end up on throughout pregnancy which means that I’m edging closer to a planned section rather than a VBAC (I had a large post partum haemorrhage with C & I want to have the option of an epidural (I want to avoid narcotic pain relief since we’re likely to have a somewhat impaired baby as a result of the ABO incompatibility), I can’t be induced because of the previous section and planning a section would give us more control over the anticoagulation). I told her that I feel completely overwhelmed by making plans that far ahead (not to mention giving fate the finger which is never wise) - so we’re putting it on the back burner until 18-20 weeks when we’ll meet again this time with her, my midwife & anaesthetist.
She offered to scan me there & then, which was fab because S hadn’t been able to come to the last one. Unfortunately she had the crappiest scanner of all time, no TV probe & I had an incredibly full bladder. It gave me a good appreciation of quite how retroverted my uterus is - we could see bladder, the tiniest bit of uterus, maybe a baby foot & the rest was buried somewhere around my kidneys (well not really but you get the impression). The placenta is completely anterior (another thing putting me off the VBAC, anterior placenta often means OP baby - I really don’t want another long, agonising OP labour (with quite probably another PROM making it so much worse)) so when she tried with the doppler all we could hear was placenta. I tried again when we got home (with an empty bladder), babe is tucked up between my femoral artery & the placenta but I did get a minute or two of beautiful 150bmp heart beat.
So that’s it, lots of decisions that I don’t have to make yet, another scan on 5th of May & for now I’m left to my nausea.
