The First Trimester (Part Two)

Back to my frantic summary of the first trimester. It consists of research, general anxiety, and anticipation of various doctor appointments. When Baby Car first started calling her Obstemagician, they made it really clear that they weren't interested in seeing her until deep into that first trimester. When we finally got to go, we had gone for weeks with only our little plastic pregnancy tests (albeit a damn ton of them) to indicate that she was pregnant. When we finally got to go ( a full MONTH after we got our positive pregnancy test), we were excited to at least have a medical professional tell us that Baby Car was, indeed, a Baby Car (and not just a queasy, hormonal mess).

So we met with the nurse – not a doctor – and she performed a cursory physical exam and used her little cardboard spinny wheel to give us an estimated due date. There was no official declaration of pregnancy or anything cool like that. We asked for an ultrasound, or really anything to prove to us that there was a little person in there, but no luck. Rules are rules I guess. The nurse pretty much hit Baby Car with a bunch of questions about her medical history and sucked about eight kinds of fluid out of her body.

Bottom line: the whole thing was pretty anti-climactic. Baby Car was bummed, too – which made me sad.

A week or so later…STOP! Okay, I know if you've been reading any other blogs or articles or message boards or pregnancy-themed graffiti, you've noticed that everybody else that's writing about this sort of thing can break the whole thing down week by week and tell you exactly when everything happened. I can't. Moving forward, I'll try, but looking back, I have no freaking clue. Sorry about that. Anyway…a week or so later, we got to see the actual doctor.

This particular obstemagician was very hardcore and made it very clear that her priority was the baby, not the Baby Car. She was stern, clinical, and sort of bossy. She managed to make up for it somewhat by breaking out a little gismo that she said had a chance of picking up the baby's heartbeat. In the interest of anybody out there that might be excitedly waiting to hear that first heartbeat, I did some cheating (peeked at Baby Car's blog) and figured out that this happened at week 12. Don't get mad at me if your doctor doesn't do things the same way, but for us, we got the little heartbeat gismo at week 12.

The way the doctor set the stage for the heartbeat, I wasn't expecting much. "Let's see if we can hear anything that sounds like a heartbeat in there," she said. I was expecting to be able to barely make out some distant noise, like listening to radio static under water, but as soon as she pushed the anal-probe looking thing up to Baby Car's belly, there is was badumbadumbadumbadum – fast. It was really cool. I think it was humming along at 157 beats per minute, or to put it in perspective, roughly the same as my heart rate when climbing stairs after eating Mexican food.

I was stoked. Baby Car was not. I could tell that she wasn't going to be happy until she saw an actual ultrasound.