My Pregnancy

I found out I was pregnant on the 24th of August 2013. We hadn't been trying for very long so it was nerve wracking but also super exciting at the same time. 

My pregnancy was pretty straightforward. Up until the end everything pretty much followed the normal course:

The First Trimester:
It was difficult. For someone who is very rarely sick I suffered from morning sickness pretty bad, but from week 16 it cleared up completely and never came back. The exhaustion was difficult, especially in the early days when there's not really any physical signs of being pregnant. When there's not much baby bump, or when there is one but it's still pretty small, telling someone you're exhausted doesn't always go down well. People that had no experience of being pregnant thought I was putting it on or exaggerating. Luckily I developed a bump pretty early on so people eventually understood why I was so tired all the time.

The Second Trimester:

As I said the morning sickness cleared up. The exhaustion went away too, though not completely, but I did find myself with slightly more energy than before. As predicted, through my second trimester was when I really started to feel the baby move. Round about the 18 week mark, I began to get the 'butterflies' feeling and around week 22 I started to feel him kick, and once he started he didn't stop! It was the most sensational feeling ever. It's so special finally feeling that tiny human kicking and moving away inside me.

Trimester 3:
This was where my problems began. During my dating scan in week 12, my sonographer told me I had a low lying placenta. Which meant my placenta was sitting at the bottom, close to the opening of my cervix as apposed to... well anywhere else really. Usually it sits quite high up your stomach. This wasn't a major problem, it can be quite common and usually it eventually moves up by itself. 

At 28 weeks I had a glucose test to check for gestational diabetes. I'm not diabetic but my dad is which meant I was at a higher risk of developing diabetes. The test results were a bit mixed. It's a 2 part test where you get blood taken after fasting for at least 10 hours, then get blood taken 2 hours after having a glucose drink to see how your body copes with the high levels of glucose in your body. My blood sugar level after the glucose drink were fine and completely normal, which is what they look for. However my blood sugar levels after the 10 hour fast were higher than the normal levels. My midwife asked a consultant to look at the results who said they were completely fine, nothing to worry about and I had to continue being treated as normal. Yay no diabetes! 

At week 32 we went back for an extra scan to check if my placenta had moved up, which thankfully it had. The sonographer decided to measure the baby and do a growth scan while she was at it. At 32 weeks my baby was calculated to weigh 6lbs 13oz. Which is pretty big for that age! 2 weeks later I had a pretty horrific appointment with a consultant, where he told me I would never be able to deliver my baby naturally if I went full term because he was so big, I needed to control my sugar levels because they were out of control and fluctuating sugar levels could cause still birth (yes he mentioned still birth to a woman who was 34 weeks pregnant!!!!) He told me I had to control my diet better and hope the baby came out soon or else he was going to be 11 or 12lbs when he was born! Obviously this worried me. Up until then my pregnancy had been pretty plain sailing and I had felt totally in control of the whole thing, and suddenly I felt like it was out of control. I was booked in for another growth scan at 37 weeks and if the baby was still big I would need to consider being induced or a cesarean section. Not the type of things you really want to hear so close to the end if your pregnancy. Because of the low lying placenta in the beginning, we had already talked about and considered a c-section so it was something we already knew enough about. But it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to happen. But ho hum I did what I was told and went for another growth scan where the sonographer measured him to be only 7lbs 7oz at 37 weeks. So with a sigh of relief I trotted back to the consultant at 38 weeks thinking things weren't quite as bad as first thought. Wrong. This consultant (a different one from last time) looked at my notes and immediately decided I had in fact had gestational diabetes and I need to go to hospital for an induction because this was going to be a biiiiig baby! Gavin and I looked at each other slightly worried, the midwife phoned the hospital to arrange a time for me to go in, as I thought to myself 'oh this won't be so bad, I'll have a few days to prepare myself' No no no. We had to go in at 8pm that night. So on Monday the 7th of April we grabbed my bags and headed to hospital...

Kirsty x