Tag Archives: chronic illness pregnancy

32 Week Appointment and Growth Scan

I didn’t write a second trimester update, as I actually felt fantastic. My energy took a while to come back after the first trimester, and it never hit “pre pregnancy baseline,” but all the other symptoms of the first trimester faded away. I got to experience life as a “normal” person, with a normal body, having a normal pregnancy. Honestly, I haven’t felt that healthy in years!

At 23 weeks, we got to have our anatomy scan, which is an hour long ultrasound where they check out every part of baby to make sure everything is growing and forming as it should. Bee is totally perfect! During the anatomy scan, we noticed the umbilical cord was inserting in the side of the placenta instead of in the middle, so I was scheduled to come back at 32 weeks for a growth scan. Sometimes, when the cord inserts in the side, it can get kinked or compressed and inhibit baby’s growth, so we wanted to make sure Bee stayed on track.

Profile picture from the anatomy scan!
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Chronic Illness Pregnancy: First Trimester

After three years, three months, and eight days of waiting, hoping, and praying… WE GOT OUR FIRST POSITIVE PREGNANCY TEST! Somehow, in all that time, we’d never gotten a positive. To learn more about what it took us to get to this point, check out the “Infertility” category on my blog, and read my previous post about our InvoCell/IUI cycle. While we were obviously quite happy, infertility robs you of the blissful ignorance many first time parents get to enjoy at the beginning of their pregnancy. Even if you haven’t ever personally experienced loss, you become acutely aware of when and how everything can go horribly wrong. Infertility is also extremely traumatic, and that trauma can cause you to subconsciously protect yourself by disconnecting you from the experience.

This post has taken me quite a while to write, because I was extremely dissociated from my pregnancy until very recently (I am 22 weeks pregnant while writing this). It felt like I was watching a very detailed vlog of someone else’s pregnancy, not that everything was happening to me. It’s a very weird thing to explain, but the people who have had the misfortune of dealing with infertility all have seemed to understand exactly what I’m talking about. It’s like a constant “when is this all going to go wrong” sensation, mixed with a lucid dream.

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