Time to play some catch up on this amazing journey! If you’ve read the first post of this, you may have guessed that we are expecting. It is nothing short of a miracle to be at this point.
For about 10 weeks, my wife had to continue with the medications until the placenta took over providing the nutrients for the baby to continue to grow and develop. One of the things that we were spoiled with while working with the fertility clinic was weekly ultrasounds. IVF pregnancies are considered a high-risk pregnancy and our ages didn’t help either so the weekly ultrasounds were used to monitor the developmental progress of the fetus. If you’ve never experienced an ultrasound as an expecting parent, let me tell you, there is nothing like it. Being able to see the growth of the fetus and the different body parts that you can start to make out is truly incredible along with hearing the heartbeat. Seeing the baby start to move around is also an amazing experience as you watch them moving and doing flips. I don’t recall which week it was where we could see the formation of the spinal cord but we were able to see and hear the heartbeat at the first ultrasound that was done.
At week 12 we were transitioned over to the OB clinic who will see us through to the end now. At this point, we are 17 weeks pregnant. Typically, we won’t have another ultrasound until we hit the 20 week mark. Since this is a high-risk pregnancy, we will have an appointment for an ultrasound that performs a detailed anatomy scan to look at all of the organs and body parts development and make sure everything is good.
One of the scariest things in this journey happened just before the Fourth of July. My wife started to have a cough that progressively got worse. We finally went to the emergency room when she was having trouble breathing and a high temperature. She had taken some Robitussin a little while before we left and that brought her temperature down before we got to the hospital. She had taken a COVID test that morning and fortunately it was negative. We had also been monitoring her SPo2 levels and never really saw the level drop below 95. We ended up spending nearly four hours in the emergency room and found out that my wife had pneumonia in the right middle lobe of her lungs. She got two rounds of IV antibiotics and another prescription for antibiotics to take for several days after. She also was given a pain killer to help with some of the chest pain that she was having.
One thing that I learned during this trip is that you need to constantly let the medical staff know that you are pregnant. More than once we had members of the medical staff express that they didn’t know that my wife was pregnant. We had let them know when my wife was admitted, we let the nurses know, the lab tech know, the x-ray tech know, and even the doctor. Even though we had let them know, I know that not everyone “heard” that statement based on statements made near the end of the time in the emergency room. The x-ray tech also wasn’t aware until my wife told her and she said that they don’t always get to read the chart before doing what they need to do. It is my opinion that you can’t express that you are pregnant enough when you are in this situation. I wish we would’ve also asked them to listen to the baby’s heartbeat while we were there for some added peace of mind. We didn’t get that done until the follow up visit with my wife’s primary care doctor a week later.
Another thing that we learned is that the likely cause of the pneumonia was from aspiration from the heart burn my wife was experiencing. Apparently pneumonia in the right middle lobe is nearly always caused by this. An easy way to help prevent this from occurring is to sleep on your left side. This helps to position the bronchial tubes in such a way that it makes it more difficult for the acid reflux to make it into the lungs.
That is all for know but expect more to come as this part of the journey is still really getting started.