Yup, still no baby. A huge thank you to all those who have refrained from emailing, calling, Facebooking, texting, etc. to ask if she has arrived yet because that means that you trust me/us to keep you posted 🙂 I really, truly appreciate the messages of excitement without the asking!

There have been a few updates on the baby front, even if there is no actual human child yet. Today, in fact, was probably the most emotionally turbulent day I’ve had so far in this labor/birth journey that was relatively unconnected to cancer.

So– my regular (super-puffy-hearted) OB was on vacation last week (the nerve! Just kidding!). So that meant I saw two other OBs in the practice, one of whom I had seen before, a long time ago. Since I am now officially “overdue,” I am being seen more often and monitored more closely.

There had been concerns about my blood pressure (see two entries ago) and preeclampsia. I decided to take the elevator to my appointment on Monday, instead of taking the 3 flights of stairs like I usually like to, to see if that helped my blood pressure. Sure enough, BP was fine. However, there was some protein in my urine this time, which is one of the other signs of preeclampsia (TMI ALERT: I think this might have been affected by the fact that my sample was VERY small this visit). They had me give another sample at the end of my visit (after I had drunk plenty of water) and it was fine. I also had more blood work done. We had another NST and AFI (the heart rate monitoring and fluid check) and everything looked great.

So this morning, first thing, I got a call from one of the nurses saying that my blood work was fine. Good!

Then in the afternoon, one of the “new-to-me” OBs called to go over the blood work with me. I said, “Yes, they called me. So everything’s fine, right?” He said, “Well, not exactly…” He and the other “new-to-me” OB had talked about it and felt as though I was “on the verge” of preeclampsia and didn’t feel comfortable waiting to induce me until next week (I had asked to push it back until July 5th, if possible, given my lack of dilation and effacement and general lack of progress). They wanted to keep the Friday date and possibly even move it up. He suggested bringing my bag with me to the monitoring tomorrow (which I am positive will be exactly like all the others and be JUST FINE).

I would TOTALLY have been on board with this if I even felt for a moment that their concerns about preeclampsia were justified. As it is, EVERY TIME I’ve checked my BP at home, it has been LOW (120s/70s is common). And I’ve had NONE of the other signs that I can tell. Even the blood pressure readings they were getting in the office didn’t seem that high to me, and ALWAYS went down after a few minutes (remember the stairs?).

It also really irritated me that both of them basically said, more than once, that since I was past 40 weeks, they were looking for any reason not to “keep me pregnant.” So even the tiniest evidence would be held against me. If it were my regular OB saying this, I would trust him because he has earned that trust, but I’ve just met these other OBs and they already want me un-pregnant! Sorry, but I need more convincing evidence than what they currently have to prove that my body isn’t able to safely keep this baby any more.

I was really upset by this news about not moving back my induction-slash-moving it up, mainly because induction when the cervix/body isn’t ready has a higher risk of c-section and also a much higher chance of needing an epidural. I was trying to figure out why I was so upset when I realized it’s because I have worked SO STINKING HARD to get to a place where a natural birth was even a possibility that to have my best chance at that taken away for (what seems to me) not-excellent reasons is just not fair. As I’ve said over and over, I will do what needs to be done and am open to the birth I need to have to have a healthy baby & me, but I don’t want to give up my chance at a dream for no good reason.

So I emailed my super-puffy-heart OB, who got back into work today, and he suggested another test to see if I really did have protein in my urine and then going from there. YES! I love decisions based on good information!

So now, lucky me, I get to save all my pee for a whole 24 hours! And keep it in our fridge! Pregnancy is sooooo weird!

Our doulas also gave us some good advice that has helped to calm me down as well. One of them reminded me that we could ask for a couple different induction options before going to the Pitocin (a drug that causes the super strong contractions that lead many women to need an epidural). So I emailed my awesome OB to see if those might be options as well before jumping to drugs. If I can use those successfully, then I am OK being induced earlier if needed.

In the meantime, we are doing all the fun things that may or may not speed up the process: acupressure massage (learned from one of our doulas this AM), drinking special tea, taking special oil pills, walking, etc. Will any of it work? Eh, we’ll see. But it won’t hurt!

Either way, we’ll have a real live baby by next week! (Holy smokes!!! I still can’t really believe it…!)