We had the sonogram first and this was a wonderful experience. The lady doing the sonogram this time had been out for a while because she broke her arm. She is great. She talked to us through everything she was looking at (unlike the last two we had where they didn’t say two words to us). She also wanted to experiment with 3D sonogram pictures. They were really cool. We talked a little about the Echocardiogram from last week, and she was telling us that she read Dr. Smith’s notes that the baby wouldn’t cooperate. She has had the privilege of going to his office and working with him directly, so she knows exactly what he is like. My first question to her was, Is the baby still breech? She said no, she is head down. She was also able to get great images of the heart that Dr. Smith wasn’t able to get. She said “If Dr. Smith was here he would be jealous.” She told us the measurements look good, and she weighs about 2lbs, 9 oz. right now.
After the sonogram, they hooked me right up to the NST (non stress test) monitors. There are actually two monitors, one that monitors the baby’s heartbeat and movements, and the other determines if I am having any contractions. These were both very good according to the nurse. When I first got in the room, they gave me a really sweet drink, because I had to be tested for gestational diabetes. What happens is you drink this really sweet drink, and then in one hour, they draw your blood. We got in the room at 3:55pm. The monitor took about a half hour.
Then we went into another room to meet with the nurse practitioner and the Dr. This was the shortest part of the whole visit, because we had to get to the lab at 4:55 to have my blood drawn. We met with the Nurse practitioner first. She spoke with us and told us that everything looks great. The baby is growing very nicely. I did get some homework to do though. Everyday, I have to monitor the baby’s movements. I have to count 10 movements an hour, three times a day (they gave me some advise, the baby likes to move around after eating, so probably breakfast, lunch and dinner times will work best). We met with Dr. Nosovitch briefly, I think the only question he asked was do you have any questions? And we didn’t because we had already asked the nurse practitioner and got our answers. Then we had to get down to the lab.
We didn’t leave Syracuse until around 5:30pm. (this was one of the longer visits, which they told us about so we were expecting to be there late.
The next few appointments are going to be shorter we are hoping. We will have the NST and talk to the Dr. each week for the next three weeks.
They also set us up with the NICU consultation (10/5/09) (we will get a tour of the Neonatal ICU and they will go over the procedures of where our baby will be and what will be done. We also have an appointment set up to meet with the surgeon Dr. Ratner (11/4/09). We have many questions for him about what will go on in during and after the surgery.
Dr. Ratner is K's surgeon! He is AMAZING!! He checked in on K everyday while she was at the hospital- I mean he checks on all his babies- but he was just so easy to talk to, and answered any question you had, even if you asked it 10 times. At the hospital sometimes Dr. Ratner is out when your baby can have surgery- we were lucky and Ratner was there for K's.
ReplyDeleteYou can really tell Dr. R loves his job!! He remembers faces- so even if he saw you out some where other than the hospital he would say Hi.. he is amazing!
K even had to have a gore-tex patch put in her abdomen to help stretch it some before closing her up.. and he jokingly asked if I wanted the patch when he took it out, and I excitedly said YES! He laughed and really saved it for us!! :) I love him! :)