Baby Drama

We've had an eventful past few days at the Schloemer household. The baby was threatening to come out so we took a belly picture yesterday just in case. It all started last week but got worse Monday night. You see I've been itching all over like crazy lately and was looking in my baby book to see if they had any suggestions. Well, it was telling me that if I itched all over and didn't have a rash it was either a hormone imbalance or a liver problem called cholestasis of pregnancy. The latter one only happens to less than 1% of women in the US so naturally I just thought it was a hormone imbalance. Well, very early Tuesday morning I started have a lot of contractions and was spotting. It was good that I had an appointment early Tuesday or I would be a little nervous by this point.

Well, I went into my doctor and told her all about the itching, contractions, and bleeding and she thought it might be the liver problem and had me do some blood work. Later that day we found out that it was the liver problem after all. This was not good news because it can lead, among other things, to a stillborn baby. She then told me I was to get an amniocentesis to check baby Alex's lungs for maturity and if they were mature she would take him out tomorrow. HOLY COW! Naturally this freaked me out a little bit. We set up the amnio for Wednesday afternoon.

The amnio was another fun adventure. My appointment was a 2:20 but they didn't take me back until nearly 3:00. The amnio started at 3:40 and was actually quite painful which I didn't expect. By 4:00 they hooked me up to a non-stress test to make sure it didn't put me into labor. By this time I was a really hungry mommy since I'd been fasting since midnight to prepare for the possible c-section. In the end it was too late to do the c-section either way so I'd fasted all day for nothing.

Yesterday evening about 6:00pm my OB called me with the results to the amnio. Mature lungs rate at a 55 and Alex's were at a 49 so she said we'll wait a week for his lungs to mature and then take him out on the 28th. I'm glad that we are waiting until he's ready but a week of itching is not fabulous. The drastic change in the scheduled birth date spelled trouble for my paper chain. Yesterday morning it read 23 days left. A reasonable number. However, after all the baby drama and liver problems today it reads 6 days left. I had to remove 17 days which was quite a chunk of the chain. It was pretty fun to take so many off at one time and I'm excited to see my little Alex on Wednesday.