First OB Doctor Appointment

As the title says, I just got back from my first doctor’s appointment at the OB’s office. About 10 days ago I had an ultrasound done with the NP and had a nurse visit, but this was my first time going in to meet with one of the physicians.

As I mentioned previously, I purposely made this appointment with Dr. N. There has been an influx of new doctors into the practice and since we knew we’d have a lot to discuss, I wanted to make sure we met with the practice’s most compassionate and in my opinion, best doctor for this first appointment. I know a lot of my friends share the same opinion about him!

Anyway, everything was good. The doppler was sitting on the table when we walked in but Dr. N. wheeled in his portable ultrasound machine which of course made me happy. At 10 weeks 5 days I’m sure they worry about freaking people out if it is hard to find the heartbeat on doppler. Dr. N. impressed me off the bat by making it clear he read my chart before he came in. He joked about how the machine needed to load faster since he knew I was nervous. But all looked good. Baby was moving at the beginning and then sleeping at the end. We listened to the heartbeat which sounded perfect at 167 bpm. He took a good look at my uterus and sac and said it looked totally normal and in the one view was “shaped like mickey mouse”.

When he did the swab he looked around and said no active bleeding in my cervix so still no real explanation for the brown discharge. His best guess is that my cervix is just friable and that it is coming from there.

Then we got into the questions. He said that I’ll continue to have my thyroid monitored every 4 weeks. So if I don’t have an appointment that matches up in timing I’ll just come in for the lab work. He said he preferred to err on the side of higher doses to keep me away from the borderline situation we’ve been in.

Next we talked about the preterm labor. Since I didn’t actually deliver early, he said that his gameplan will be for cervical length checks (which are done via ultrasound) every four weeks starting at four weeks after the anatomy scan. If at any point we notice it start to shorten, they’ll decrease the amount of time between checks. He also said that they are going to be extra cautious with me and that I will have to contact them with any sort of labor signs.

I’m glad that they are taking this precaution and hopefully it will all be for nothing and my cervix will stay the same length until full term this time!

I asked if he thought that the preterm labor could be related to the horrible fibroid degeneration pain I had the day before it started, and he said its possible, but he would not attribute preterm labor entirely to that. Which means no one knows why it happened!

Finally, he said that to him, once you make it past 16 weeks your odds of a spontaneous miscarriage are pretty much gone. Here I thought we were only trying to make it to 12 weeks! Oy…only five weeks to go!