Not stellar

Well, today's appointments were not stellar.

At the NST baby girl was moving around quite a bit, but her heartrate was not accelerating with all of that movement. This is unusual. So we had to spend about 45min trying to get enough good movements with accelerations. She also had several short heart rate dips, which is new to this appointment, but nothing to worry about the nurse said. I haven't seen anything like these at the 2 prior NSTs we have had, so I am still gonna worry a bit. All I can say is that I am glad we will be having another NST on Friday to double check on her.

At the cervical length check it was immediately apparent that my cervix has shortened again. Her first measurement was 1.92cm, her second one was 2.4cm...both of which are much shorter than last week's measurement. She felt my cervix and thankfully it is still closed up nice and tight. She went on to say that if she was checking me out based on the feeling of my cervix alone, she wouldn't be worried at all...but the fact that my cervix had shortened so much in one week, made her a little nervous. She said that she still thinks that everything will be okay and I will be pg for at least another month, but she made sure to tell me that she was on-call this weekend in case I needed to get ahold of her. Yikes!

I asked her to double-check on June's position. She is still breech and facing toward my left side, so her head is on the upper right side. This was exactly how Lincoln was sitting for 3 months prior to when he finally flipped at 35 weeks. I really really hope that she will copy her brother in this, and flip before delivery.

So, next week the doctor will be doing another cervical length check, but first she will do a fetal fibronectin (fFN) test, which can tell you with pretty good accuracy if you are NOT going to go into labor in the next 2 weeks. If the test is negative, most likely you will not go into labor, if the test is positive, you may or may not go into labor within he next 2 weeks. So we will be hoping for a nice big fat negative test result next week. I will keep you all posted.

I am taking this all in stride, and am not really all that worried about June coming in the next few weeks. We have been here before with Lincoln, and I know that every pregnancy and baby is different so she could still surprise us. But if she did happen to be delivered now, we are in a pretty good place for a good outcome, healthwise. It wouldn't be ideal of course, but my twin sisters were born at 26 weeks with many many complications, but they both survived, and I was born at 34 weeks, and only spent 11 days in the nursery with no real complications. So a baby girl born at 31-32 weeks (who already received the steroid shots for lung development), would likely spend about a month in the NICU and special care nursery for feeding/growing and possibly breathing issues. Lets hope it doesn't come to this, but there could be worse things...