36 week ultrasound

Yesterday's ultrasound was good. Although Alia was feeling shy and covering her little face with her hand making a profile shot impossible, they were able to see what they needed to see to deem her healthy and of average size...currently she weights about 6.5 pounds, and they project she'll weigh about 7.5 pounds by the time she's born.

Huh?

I thought for sure she weighed at least 14 pounds by the feel of my aching pelvis. I thought she may weigh...I don't know...maybe 16 pounds at birth!

Now a thought about the ultrasound itself...the regular ultrasound tech wasn't there yesterday, so we got the backup girl. I've been with her once before, right after we lost one of the babies...who knows, maybe I have a negative association with this tech because of that. And it's not like she's ever done anything wrong. But there are a couple of things that bother me about this tech, from trivial to well, clinical.

On the trivial side, do you know anyone who gets Botox treatments? Have you ever noticed that there face is not only paralyzed, but in a constant state of dewy perspiration? Well, this tech has "the glow", and a frozen face, and although she seems to have gone through the Botox training where they tell you you may have to try harder to smile and express emotion in your newly paralyzed face, this tech's face is in a constant state of a frozen half smile. And her eyebrows and entire forehead don't move at all...so it seems like she's a vacant pod person gazing at you with an emptiness in her soul, and it kind of freaks me out.

Secondly, on the more clinical side, let me just preface this by saying that I get the state that health care is in...I worked in the medical arena for my entire career, and Ajay is an anesthesiologist so I know all too well just how overworked everyone is, and how patients just cannot receive the level of care that they received before managed care and big insurance companies took over the world. I get that. But this substitute technician has been almost completely quiet throughout both of the scans that I've had with her. My regular technician starts out by pointing out "head, feet, eyes. Here's the heart...it's got a nice rhythmic beat of XXX beats per minute...." My point is it doesn't take much to make the ultrasound a much more gratifying and informative experience for us. A little communication wouldn't kill her...but that leads me back to her entirely paralyzed face...maybe she just....can't....talk...

Changing gears....let's focus on the positive, shall we? A good part of the ultrasound was being able to see how Alia's positioned in there so now I can make sense of the movements I'm feeling. Now I know her head is down, her spine is running midline, she is facing to my right, and all those taps under my ribs are in fact little kicks with her little feet. When I feel a hardness beneath my belly button, it's most likely a shoulder. And when I feel like she's doing a full body stretch all at once...well, that's her telling us it's time for some more space.

Speaking of space, this week she torpedoed forward. My belly seems to have projected directly forward by a couple of inches over night. If I want to get a laugh out of Ajay I just turn to the side and lift my shirt...it's amazing just how much she's grown in the last weeks.