Feb 15, 2011

Hearts and hips

Baby-boy isn't quite here yet, but that doesn't mean he's not active. Today hubby and I went to the children's hospital for a specialist appointment with an echo-cardiologist to look at his heart. The good news is that they had real trouble spotting the arrhythmia, so much so that it took them an hour of ultrasound scanning to get all the pictures they needed. I tried to stay as still as possible to make their job easier, but needless to say, by the end of the hour, my body was protesting vehemently. My back was seizing up, my belly full of dried gel gunk which does my PUPPP no good at all, and my hips ... we'll get to my hips in a bit.


Baby-boy also wanted to get out of there after a while and made his feelings known by jabbing his knees, fists and elbows, and twisting out of the way whenever he could. Hubby was equally in agony, his head/face pain not being resolved. A visit to the doc yesterday informed us that it's most likely some kind of viral reaction by the central nervous system, and that there is nothing they can do about it. So he has to wait it out, with his head on fire all the while -- so much so that he can't even wear a hat in the -20C weather (-27C if you add wind chill).


All of us were happy to come home after the hospital visit. We got the results right away and basically were told that the arrhythmia is not a worry at all, since it's now so infrequent. Apparently it happens more often to babies in late stages of pregnancy. They did confirm, however, that baby-boy has a small hole in his heart. Too tiny to be of any major concern though, at about 2mm. They told us not to worry; we can still have a regular delivery and we don't need to do anything special to care for him after he's born. They simply want to do a follow up visit with the little one when he's 4-6 weeks old. So all  is good for the moment. Not that we were truly worried, but it's nice to have it officially confirmed.


Yesterday's check up went fine. I have a small perforation in my right ear which probably caused the pain over the weekend. No infection thankfully, so just been told to stay out of the swimming pool. The doctor also said that I'm 1 cm dilated. But my cervix was still quite high, so the birth is not imminent yet. I suspect that dilation is continuing to happen as some of my mucus plug appears to be loosening today, so perhaps in a few more days ... exciting.


In the meantime, I'm suffering a new ailment -- or rather, an exaggerated version of a pain in my hips I've been feeling for a while. When I say this, I mean that yesterday the pain became excruciating. I could no longer walk at all; any time I tried to push one leg forward, my pubic bone felt like it was dislocating. Changing positions is agony -- sitting seems to least painful, but to get up or lie down, or worse yet, turn over when I'm lying down all cause extreme pain. I suspect that it's symphysis pubis dysfunction, where the two frontal parts of the hip become misaligned either due to hormones or something else.


Again, not much one can do while pregnant, other than sit on an ice pack to help reduce inflammation, which is what I'm doing as I write. My main goal is to reduce the pain enough so that when labor begins it doesn't add unnecessary amounts of agony. It's a tiny bit better today, but it's frustrating not being able to do any exercise at all now that swimming is out and walking is a disaster.


As my mom says: time for baby-boy to come out already.

1 comment:

  1. Good lord what a nightmare. I feel like I just watched an episode of MASH. All three of you need a vacation.

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