. . .not a lot different than 38 weeks, really.
Update from the Doc
Today was my 39 week check up. Before going any further, I’m going to say that this info may get a little personal, so if you don’t want to know all the details, skip this post.
The doctor did an internal exam, and says things are much the same as in past weeks: the baby’s head is way down, I’m almost 4 cm dialated, and my cervix is about 60% effaced. On the one hand, this is good! As my doc points out, a lot of women go through hours of hard labor before reaching this point, and I’m walking around like this baby’s about to fall out. On the other hand, I’ve been at this stage for almost three weeks, so it’s not like there’s continued major progress.
She also measured the fundus (basically, she takes a tape measure and measures the “longitude” of my belly), and said i’m down an inch. . .which indicates to her the baby’s head has descended even lower in my pelvis.
My weight is down one pound, which means nothing (other than I’m limiting myself to ice cream 1x per day instead of 2x).
And she listened to the heart rate. She wasn’t totally pleased with what she heard, so asked me to stay for a NST (non-stress test) where they hook you up to a fetal heart monitor for 20-30 minutes. What they look for is the baby’s heart rate to fluctuate with fetal movement at least three times in 20 minutes. The first 10 minutes on the machine, the baby’s heart rate stayed firmly in the 130s with no fetal movement. So the nurse came back in and had me turn on my side. This did the trick and seemed to wake the baby right up b/c we pretty quickly had the usual array of karate chops, big stretches, irish jigs, and whatever else s/he does in there to keep busy. For the next 20 minutes, his/her heart rate poinged around btwn 140-170—very good, very active. I actually asked for the print-out from the monitor–it’s sort of interesting to see just how active they are. The machine also picks up fetal movement (more accurately than I can detect it even), so you can see the correlation between heart rate and movement. If i can get this scanned, I’ll post it.
I’d also like to point out that this illustrates why using the heart rate to indicate gender is a total myth–the heart rate can and should fluctuate with movement, so at any given point the heart rate will be higher or lower. It’s fairly random when you happen to be in a for an appointment whether your baby’s moving or not, and whether that’s the moment they check the heart rate with the doppler. At every appointment I’ve ever had, our baby’s heart rate has clocked in at the 130s, but s/he must have been having zen moments during the 45 seconds we listened to the doppler. Because seeing what happens when we actually are hooked up to a monitor for a period of time shows you the baby is pretty much cycling through relatively alert and asleep periods all the time.
At any rate, we talked a bit about the game plan for delivery, which I’ll explain in another post.
Bottom line: 39 weeks and all is well.
