High Risk

So today marks the first day of my ninth month of pregnancy. We already have the most adorable 3 year old on the planet. It took us a while to get pregnant with him and then it took almost a year and a half to get pregnant with this baby. We had actually turned in our initial application to adopt when we did get pregnant. What a blessing.

I am trying to do a VBAC so technically I was not low risk pregnancy to begin with, but if my pregnancy were a facebook status, it would be upgraded to high risk. It all happened three weeks ago when Mark and I went to a hockey game. While there my hands and feet started to itch like they had been bewitched by something from Wesley’s Wizard Wizbangs. It was a few days of this when I decided to look it up in my pregnancy book, but I could tell something was wrong. Tell you Doctor immediately it said. I only had two days until my next appointment so I waited and talked to her at my appointment. I was on rotation with another Dr. and the practice and told her I was itching. So she took a blood test. They called me three days later and said I needed to come in for another blood test. In the mean time being the internet savvy googler that I am I looked up the symtoms.

Cholestasis of Pregnancy. You can read all about it here.

http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/cholestasispregnancy.html

The horrifying sentence is the effects it has on the baby, with an increased rate of still birth. It took a week and a half for the second blood test to come back, saying it did in fact have it. In the mean time there were night I slept only 4 or five hours because I wanted to rip my own flesh off because it just wouldn’t stop itching. So now I get a weekly ultrasound and an earlier due date. Something like this makes you stop and look at things a little bit differently. Before I was so concerned about doing a VBAC, and that has just fallen by the wayside. I am not naturally a worrier, but something like this makes you worry about everything. The list of worries would just be too long.

The bottom line is we all have to listen to ourselves and take nothing for granted.