Elissa C. Nysetvold

Baby’s First Ultrasound (Is Not Mom’s First Rodeo): A Story of Confusion.

I told a bunch of people we would find out the gender of our baby last Monday. We did have an ultrasound, but things didn’t exactly go as planned. Don’t worry, friends—nothing is wrong; we’re just a little bit confused.

Since the beginning, something about this pregnancy has seemed a little bit off—not wrong, just off. For one thing, it took forever to confirm the pregnancy. I went through tons of pregnancy tests and got negative after negative after negative, even after I knew I was pregnant. Food was starting to sound gross. I was tearing up at diaper commercials on YouTube. I was feeling sympathy for Hillary Clinton. Clearly something was up, I thought, but it took weeks longer than it should have to finally get that faint blue line.

Then my blood test showed I had lower progesterone than I should have, so they put me on progesterone pills. Guys, if you’ve never been on progesterone, it’s weird. I’ve never been stoned before, but those pills gave me a glimpse of what it must be like. The nurse had me wake up at 4:30 to take my morning dose so I could sleep off some of the weirdness, but it didn’t entirely work.

Then there was the morning sickness. It was worse than last time, but it set in later than it should have, and lasted several weeks longer than I expected. I thought I was in for one of those 9-months-of-morning-sickness pregnancies like the ones my mom had, but a couple weeks into the second trimester, it cleared right up.

(Are you starting to detect a pattern here? Because I sure didn’t.)

The 18-week ultrasound was last Monday, and I showed up already feeling nervous. After all, this was the ultrasound that clued us in to Dan’s urinary troubles, so I worried about what they would find. As soon as our baby showed up on the screen, I immediately thought something was wrong. There was a good heartbeat, but the baby looked so little and still compared to Dan at that age. Dan was wiggling around, waving his fingers and obligingly opening his legs when it was time to check the gender. The baby just sat there, curled up, not moving at all. I’m no ultrasound expert, but I’ve gone through enough of them to be suspicious of what I saw. The technician took some measurements, declared that she couldn’t see anything in the gender department, and sent us on our way. It was the shortest ultrasound I’ve ever had.

While we waited for the doctor, I tried to stay positive. We dragged Dan away from the medical equipment, and I jokingly told Tom we should stop by the sketchy ultrasound place next to the mall next.

Finally, the doctor came in and announced that I was only fifteen weeks pregnant.

My first thought was, “How can that be?”

My second thought was, “Ooooh. That makes perfect sense.”

The first-day-of-last-cycle formula definitely told me I was eighteen weeks along. I certainly looked eighteen weeks—I was bigger than I was with Dan at that point, though that may just be due to this being my second pregnancy (and quite possibly due to the 10 extra pounds of baby weight I never quite managed to lose…). But this new information explained nearly every weird thing that had happened throughout my pregnancy: the delayed pregnancy test response, the morning sickness patterns, and the low progesterone. Really, it should have been obvious, and I feel kind of dumb for not figuring it out before.

The doctor said everything looks great for fifteen weeks, and all measurements they took were normal, which rules out a lot of possible issues. I’m going back in March for another ultrasound, and hopefully then we’ll get some useful information. It was kind of disappointing to hear that I’m not as far along as I thought (the groundhog saw his shadow, so you get three more weeks of pregnancy!), but at the same time, this is the best news I’ve ever had from a prenatal ultrasound, so I’m happy! Our new, “accurate” due date is July 29, and I’ll let you all know next month if our little friend is a boy or a girl!

Exit mobile version