First hospital appointment...

I went to the GP on Friday to set things in motion. To be honest, I tend not to have too much to do with the midwife at my GP's surgery when I'm pregnant - I tend to be seen more often at the fetal medicine department at the hospital. Anyway, I know the staff at the hospital pretty well... my obstetric history tends to make me pretty memorable... and I saw a lot of the team at the fetal cardiology conference I spoke at last year. I had a quick chat there with Gill Jones - the senior sister in fetal medicine, and told her I was hoping to become pregnant again. She said when I was, to register with the GP and then call her. So, as requested, I went to the GP on Friday, who promptly referred me back to the hospital! And today I rang Gill. It was great to speak to her. Although I wish my pregnancies had all been totally straightforward so I had no reason to be on first-name terms with all the hospital staff, it does feel good to have such an amazing supportive team rallying round me and LO. Gill asked how I wanted to approach this pregnancy, and I told her that we'd like a scan in the next week or so, just to confirm my dates, and to check LO has a heartbeat and is growing in the right place. I also said that we'd prefer to have no further scans until about 18 weeks when we will be able to find out for sure what we are dealing with. She was more than happy with that plan, and booked us in for a scan next Friday (March 4). Assuming all is well with LO, I am looking forward to seeing him/her for the first time, and just enjoying the experience, rather than trying to analyse every measurement. So hopefully, God willing, I'll be able to share LO's first photo with you next Friday! Gill asked how I've been feeling, and I told her how sick and tired I've been... so much more than with the boys. I asked if nausea and morning sickness was likely to be worse because I'm older now, and she said that's not necessarily the case, adding: 'But don't forget there could be two in there...' I did joke with Pete the other day that maybe I'm having twins because I've been feeling so awfully sick, but apparently the older I am, the greater my chance of a multiple pregnancy. Eek. My cousin has twins, so they're not unheard of in our family... but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it! I don't mind what we have - so long as it can stay here with us. I'm still having 'girl' vibes about this pregnancy. I don't know why - maybe just because I feel so different this time round. It's certainly the first pregnancy where I've found myself referring to the baby as 'she'. I guess we'll have to wait and see about that too! For the record - I'm now 7wks and 5days, and LO is about half an inch long.

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Seven weeks.

I'm seven weeks today and I must admit, for the past week I've felt pretty diabolical.
Chas has been off school with tonsillitis, which hasn't helped, but I have been SO nauseous. Like constant, unremitting motion sickness.
I'm not being sick every day, but I think this nausea is actually worse.
It's very hard to function around it.
I'm just hoping that sick mother = healthy baby.
I'm going to ring the hospital in a few days to book a dating scan in a couple of weeks.
Here's hoping all is well so far.

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Bleagh.

Ok, so trying to vomit surreptitiously is no fun.
In fact, vomiting at all is no fun.
But when you are being sick/trying to avoid wetting your pants because you are heaving so hard AND making sure your 7-year-old doesn't hear you puking... well, that's really no fun.
And I REALLY don't want Chas going into school, sitting in the 'news circle' and telling all his classmates: "For some reason my mum keeps being sick every morning..."
Hey ho - I'm almost enjoying this early morning sickness (in a self-pitying kind of way) because it most likely means that LO is growing well. I'm going to dig out my old pregnancy diaries from Will and Charlie and try to find out when I started throwing up with them - in my head it was nearer seven weeks.
I'm five weeks and six days today. Can't believe I'm almost halfway through the first trimester already. Long may the days fly by!

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The delights of morning sickness...

Ah yes. I remember now.
Well, here we are - only 4wks 6days in and I'm feeling so queasy already.
I haven't actually been sick yet, but have more than made up for it with the amount of heaving and retching going on.
This is all kicking in so much earlier than before - it wasn't until about seven weeks with Will and Charlie that morning sickness really took effect.
Maybe it's because I'm older this time round, or maybe my hormone levels are higher, but LO is certainly making his/her presence felt.
I don't know why, but I have a bit of a feeling that this baby might be a girl. I could be wrong, but I 'knew' from day one that Charlie was a boy.
I've been having fun looking at all the old wives' tales, to see what they reckon I'm having, and according to the ones I can check so far, it's looking like a girl too...
1. Very nauseous from early on.
2. Craving sour/citrus - I can't stop drinking bitter lemon, lime cordial and orange juice. (But I think I craved lemony stuff when I was having the boys too! I certainly had a thing about ice when I was having Will - I'd sit and crunch my way through bowls of ice cubes like they were popcorn.)
3. Bad skin - tell me about it - I have more spots than I EVER did in my teens.
4. If maternal age and year of conception are both odd or both even it's a girl, if one of each it's a boy - well, Will was born in 2002 when I was 27, and Charlie was born in 2003 when I was 28, and I'm 35 now and it's 2011... but I'll be 36 when the baby arrives, so I don't have a clue!

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
At the end of the day, I just hope, boy or girl, that LO will be healthy and well.

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Sinking in...

Well, it's been a week since these two lines appeared, and I'm finally starting to believe that I really am pregnant.
I got my positive result quite early, so I'm not five weeks yet - not until Wednesday.
I am feeling pretty tired and queasy already (and I've gone right off coffee which is most unusual for me), but part of me is just trying to forget about it until we're a bit further down the line and I can actually find out something conclusive.
All being well, the baby should be arriving at the start of October (or maybe the middle/end of October if he/she is anything like Charlie - who was two weeks late!)
Having said that, I am so accustomed to having complicated pregnancies, that I'm not taking anything for granted.
Not one day.
First, I have to get through the first twelve weeks without having a miscarriage (as happened with Baby #1)
Then I have to get past a diagnosis of Meckel-Gruber syndrome (Baby #2 - our precious little Will) - probably between 12-15 weeks.
THEN we have to pass the hurdle of the anomaly scan (16-20 weeks) to see if Baby #4 - unlike Baby #2 AND Baby #3 (Charlie) - has managed to avoid HLHS... and anything else potentially lethal.
So, quite a few fences to jump before I break out the Mothercare catalogue.
I know that must sound very pessimistic, but it's not really - I'm just being realistic.
I have no doubt that 'crunch time' will be very scary, and we hope and pray that all will be well with this little one, but we have gone into this with our eyes wide open, and are pretty philosophical about it.
With my pregnancies with Will and Charlie, I was scanned every week or two from six or eight weeks. At the moment (although I may change my mind!) we don't think we want to be scanned so often, unless necessary. I'd rather have as few scans as possible until they can tell us something definitive, as it's very stressful hauling up to the hospital every five minutes, just in case some sign of bad news has appeared.
So for now, we're thinking of scans at eight weeks, 12 weeks and then 20 weeks. Obviously, whichever way things go, we'll be having multiple scans after 20 weeks, but up until then, I'd like to try and enjoy my pregnancy as much as I can.
Even if things aren't 'normal' I'd like to pretend for as long as possible.
I'm aware this might sound odd, and please believe me, I'm not in denial - I just have a very different approach to pregnancy than most women.
Even with a positive test, I don't ever let myself think 'When the baby comes...'
It's always 'If the baby survives...'
So I'm making a concerted effort this time round to ENJOY growing a baby.
I intend to enjoy every new milestone, every change, every bout of morning sickness, every kick, every inch my belly grows - every single thing - but in its own right.
I don't know how well I'll do, but that's the plan. :-)
I haven't told the doctors yet. I'll probably give it another two or three weeks and then give the foetal medicine team a shout. They'll need to invest in a wheelbarrow to transport my mountain of maternity notes!
For the record, I'm at 4wks 3days and Little One (LO from hereon in...) is somewhere between the size of a poppyseed and a sesame seed.
Amazing how someone so tiny is already leaving big footprints across my heart.

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Yikes.

I'm pregnant.

:-)

Here we go again.

Welcome to Charlie Barley's Baby.
At the moment, this blog is private - nobody can read it except me. We have a lot coming up over the next few months, and I need to get my head around it all on my own before I let everyone else in.
But I'm used to blogging on a public blog (Charlie's News) so I guess I'll just write like I'm talking to my usual gang of readers. And I figure you'll all be reading this eventually anyway.
So.
Here we go.
Most of you will know that Charlie had his Fontan surgery last March, and has recovered brilliantly. For the first time ever, we don't have major surgery looming over us.
We always said that we'd think about another child after Charlie had his op - but his op kept being bumped further and further back because he was doing so well.
Even so, we decided not to think about more kids until his surgery was over, because we wanted to be able to focus on him 100 percent. Not to mention the fact that we live a very long way from the hospital that does his surgery, and the idea of juggling a sick Charlie as well as a baby/toddler was pretty scary.
We never envisaged he'd be seven years old before he was home and safely recovered from his Fontan.
But here we are.
I'm 35 now, so although I'm not ancient by any means, I'm certainly no spring chicken in terms of baby-making. So the clock is ticking (albeit still quite quietly.)
I wrote a diary throughout my pregnancy with Charlie, and I really wish I'd discovered blogging back then - it's so much easier to document everything on a blog, with all the pictures, links and other gadgets available. And now I have an iPhone it's even easier to snatch five minutes to write down all the stuff I'll forget otherwise. So here I am.
Anyway. Where are we at right now?
Well. I'm not pregnant - as far as I know. I spoke to the geneticist at our local hospital a few months ago, and she confirmed that there are still no scientific advances we could take advantage of to improve our odds of conceiving a child without HLHS or MGS. The only thing she could recommend was for me to take massive doses of folic acid for three months before trying to conceive (5mg per day instead of the normally recommended 0.4mg) and to call her once I am pregnant.
Ok.
I'm not going to lie. This is scary. Very scary. I swing from hopeful optimism, to blind terror, to slapping myself around the head thinking I must be absolutely mad to put myself through this.
But it doesn't really feel like there's much of a choice. I'm just not 'done' with having kids yet. I'm not ready to call it a day. And nor is Pete.
We want another baby.
Charlie wants a brother or sister that he actually gets to meet.
He knows what could happen - that we might get another baby like Will who would only be able to stay for a very little while; or that we might get a baby with a special heart like his who would need lots of operations. Or we might get one that is just plain old ordinary.
We have weighed up all the odds, countless times - for the record, we have about a 65-70% chance of a child who is perfectly fine - and have come to the conclusion that we'd prefer to take the risk and accept whatever outcome we get, rather than not give it a whirl and then hit our fifties and spend the rest of our lives wondering 'what if?'
So, I'm into my last few folic acid tablets from my initial three-month prescription, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens next.
Watch this space...