Our appointment was great! We filled out a bunch of paperwork (some of which I had completed before hand at home) and Josh ran around searching for the bathroom, because he had apparently been drinking lots of water, unknowingly in solidarity with me. He couldn't find one, and then a lady came out and sent me straight off to the bathroom to pee in the cup. I did pretty well I think, filled it almost half way! Whew. Then I could point Josh in the direction of the bathroom, which was good for him, since we were there a little over an hour.
First we went back to a little office with the financial person for the clinic. She walked us through all of the general costs of our appointments, the birth, and the hospital stay. She also covered what our insurance would cover and how much they estimate that we will be paying out of pocket when all is said and done. If everything goes normally, with a vaginal birth, no epidural, and only a 2 day hospital stay we should end up with about $2200 out of pocket cost. Seemed like a lot to me at first (today's lesson: babies are expensive!) but I guess for 9 months of care, plus hospital time, it's not too bad.
Then another woman came in and took my medical history and blood pressure (normal) and then while we waited a few minutes for the midwife, Josh looked through a bunch of the office drawers, which is apparently what he does when he is fidgety in doctor's offices. Linda came in and she was great. She was very motherly, and funny too. She took more history and asked questions about what vitamins and medicines I've been taking. She finally asked Josh some questions (do either of our families have a history of downs syndrome? we didn't know of any.) and he finally felt useful. She did say that our risk for downs is 1 in 400 because of my age, which is still fairly slim I guess. We'll have a blood test for it in 3 weeks just to be sure.
Maybe I overdid it on the water, because I had to get up and pee again before we went into the room with the ultrasound. We had thought they would just do a doppler ultrasound, where we would hear the heartbeat, but she offered to show us a picture too, and we were secretly like "YESSSSSSS!', but tried to keep our cool. Their ultrasound machine looked like it was from 1975, and the picture was definitely low-tech, but she found the baby right away, and it was big, like the size of a tennis ball! It was curled on its side, so we could see the head and its little body curled under, and one of it's arms was bent at the elbow (!!!) and it's hand was up near it's face. We could also see the little heart beating. I wish it could have printed a picture, but seriously, that machine was as old as me. At one point Linda said "well, there's only one!" which has been a big secret fear of mine… twins! I really really didn't want to try to juggle two babies at once, so I feel really really relieved about that. Also, calling the baby "it" feels sort of weird, but doing the he/she thing just seems annoying since we don't know, so I'm going with it.
Then Linda grabbed the doppler wand, got the two wands all tangled up, and was really funny trying to untangle the cords. When she got it sorted out she searched around for the heartbeat, which took 20 seconds or so to find. Then all of a sudden it was really steady and fast! She said about 150 beats per minute.
After that I had a flu shot (non-mercury kind, which they had on hand, whew) and then we made another appointment for three weeks later, on Nov. 11th. We headed over to Blossoming Lotus for lunch, where Josh told me he couldn't even figure out what he was seeing on the ultrasound until almost the end. Ha! Poor guy.
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