Still pregnant

Ever since my last post, I've had an appointment with my GP, several phone calls to midwives, an ultrasound scan, appointment with a consultant obstetrician, prescriptions issued and my first booking appointment with my midwife. It's been busy time, sorry that I've not blogged!

First up was the appointment with the GP, which was relatively uneventful. He wanted to see my homozygous Factor V Leiden lab results from Finland, but seemed to misplace them almost immediately and I had to resend them the scanned paperwork after calling a doctor about a discharge I didn't know what to make of it. That phone call seemed to nudge some other paperwork through, and I was later contacted by the midwife, who contacted the hospital, who wanted all sorts of paperwork to prove I'm eligible for NHS treatment, and after sorting that out, finally got a scan date, a consultant date and a midwife appointment. Before anything more important happened, I had to go and collect my Bounty pack which also included the 30-page A4-sized Pregnancy Notes-booklet, meant to be filled by me, the midwives and doctors that see me. In comparison to what expectant mothers are given in Finland, this seems excessive and somewhat questionable in data protection sense, as the leaflet has my NHS number, phone number, home address, health details...

So, what has been found?

Despite what I was first told by a group of midwives, I did eventually have an early scan on NHS. The due date was shifted by a day, and now it's 30th of July. I had a consultants appointment on the Tuesday after, just before Christmas, and as predicted, I was put on Fragmin, a 7500IU low molecular weight heparin injected subcutaneously, as prophylaxis against blood clots, and a baby dose of aspirin. I'll have extra ultrasound scans in the later pregnancy, I'll have a glucose test to check if I've got gestational diabetes, and some visits at the hospital.

So far I've had a week of injections and my stomach feels and looks like a pin cushion. I've not yet found the rhythm of doing it nonchalantly - I hesitate and flinch every time I need to inject. This happy activity will continue more or less until September.

We told the immediate family about the forthcoming family occasion on Christmas Day. Lots of tears were shed. We even have some video from the moment, but not publishing that quite yet :-D We asked everyone to keep the news to themselves for a few weeks more, until the second ultrasound scan. My Christmas meals included beetroot and blue cheese bake, gravlax I cured myself after freezing the fresh salmon for four days, turkey, IKEA ham, roast potates, hard cheeses and trifle. I did longingly look at everyone eating heaps of chicken liver pate, but didn't partake past a teaspoonful to try the recipe.

We had to return from the inlaws for the booking appointment with the midwife on Tuesday. It was fairly uneventful as well. Three tubes of blood were drawn, some of the booklet filled and forms filed in. I also requested a sharps box for my used needles. I do wonder why it has been so difficult to get one, hasn't yet dawned on me.

I've not had much nausea and absolutely no throwing up yet. However, in the past few weeks my appetite seems to have increased several folds, as I get hungry almost immediately after a meal. This makes trying to keep my weight where it is a bit difficult...

Anyway, that's it for now. Hopefully my fatigue and hunger pangs allow me to write again, maybe a little bit sooner.

Doctor's appointment booked, some shopping done

Two weeks ago on Sunday, week ago Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, last Tuesday

I booked a doctor's appointment on Wednesday for next week. To my surprise, The Bear wanted to come too. Well, I don't suppose it's really a surprise, I just personally don't expect much of the event as I know I'm a high-risk first time mother and in all likelihood the doctor will just refer me to the closest hospital with a specialist on haematology. It's delightful that he's so interested. I'm mostly just terrified for now, and I suspect I will be until the first trimester is over, if we ever even get there.

This morning I got the first email update from Start4Life, a webservice ran by NHS, about how the baby is developing, and what to do. Found it very comforting.

An acquaintance posted a picture from a wall in a maternity ward in a hospital in Helsinki, on Facebook yesterday. It was so bizarre - apparently on the first few weeks of pregnancy the mother 'reverts to her own time in the womb and curls into herself and her emotions'. My personal reaction to that was 'What the flaming f**k?'. I certainly don't feel like a sesame seed sized dot, or coughing up amniotic fluid from my lungs. If anything, I'm doing very adult kind of worrying, like how are we going to cope with a baby when I sometimes can't cope with making myself a bowl of cereal, and how are we going to arrange the bedrooms, when the second biggest bedroom (aka Pink Room, also Guest room) in our house is taken over by a double bed and stuff moved from the third bedroom (aka Office, or Box room) as we're in process of clearing it to be a home office...

I've tried to learn how to drink more liquids (obviously both non-alcoholic and caffeine-free) and to that goal I've bought an app to remind me to drink more, and to keep a tally on how much I've drank. In a week I've gotten bored of all sugar free high juices we've got in our house, and I'm doing a good job in developing new dislikes, too. I've axed saccharin from my decaf coffee and moved over to sucralose. All the effect a morning cup of joe has had on me before has clearly been either placebo or the morning ritual, as I haven't noticed any kind of difference in my alertness what so ever to normal coffee. I can by the way recommend Taylor's of Harrogate's Decaf coffee - if I didn't know from the package it's decaf, I wouldn't know it from the taste either. I've also purchased some plain redbush tea and Yorkshire Decaf normal tea into our cupboard. I'm unsure if the normal decaf tastes much different because it's decaf, or because it's not a hard water blend which we normally drink.

Talking of teas, I've started a taste experiment with the redbush teas in desperation of expanding my drinks selection. I made an IKEA glass carafe of Tetley's Pure Redbush, some lemon essence and some sucralose tablets yesterday, and another with two bags of a Finnish teablender Nordqvist's Moomin Redbush tea, one flavoured to be 'strawberry milkshake', both to be drank as iced teas. I'll report later how that went.

And returning to the drink reminder app, The Bear and I finally ordered me a Moto 360 watch last night, and it has already shipped from China. The drink reminder app is Android Wear compatible, so I should be getting reminders to drink onto my wrist in a few weeks. I also spent a good amount of time looking at different pregnancy tracking apps yesterday, but I'm unsure if any of them are any good. None of them are compatible with Android Wear. At least I'll have a bit more precise watch than what I've got now.

Talking of shopping, Wednesdays's Amazon Lighting Deals had us buy the first thing for the baby, now that we know we're expecting. (I participated in Hello Ruby's Kickstarter project to get a geeky computer science book for our hypothetical children to read already last year, so it doesn't really count) They had a great deal on a 12-pack of white plain muslins, so we went and ordered it. I can always use muslins for draining my concoctions, if no other use is found for them.

I also ordered a fairly expensive maternity bra from Figleaves few days ago. My breasts are achy at times and almost all the other bras feel uncomfortable when that happens. Sadly the comfy bra I have is also the most expensive pair that I bought for the wedding, so I can't keep wearing them with with wilful abandon every day for the rest of the pregnancy. I'm hoping they'll arrive today. Of course now the same bra is on sale - good thing I used all the discount voucher codes I could find when I ordered, otherwise I would have been mightily disappointed.

That's all for today, thank you very much for reading!

New beginnings

This is my first entry on this blog. I've titled it quite literally as 'New beginnings' - that is exactly what is happening. I'm pregnant. This came to me as a slight shock, even when the Larva was planned and wished for. My husbands reaction, after I redid the home pregnancy test the following morning just to check what I saw was correct, was pretty much predictable...

We got married about a half a year ago, after being engaged since 2012 and being together since 2008. We're both in our mid 30's, relatively successful in our lives and love each other enough to consider having children a idea good enough to embark on. It took some convincing from me to get honeymoon relatively quickly over and done with after the wedding, and some more convincing for us to actually start trying to conceive. I'm old enough to want the magic to happen sooner rather than later, so on the first cycle I started eating specifically formulated multivitamins, supposedly effective in helping the mother-to-be to be as fertile as possible. On the second cycle we started using Tesco ovulation tests to hone our timing perfect, and it seemed to work marvels, together with a bit of morning temperature taking and an Android app Ovuview (Google Play). I had mentally prepared myself for at least six months, if not longer.

So, now I'm pregnant. I did a test on Thursday evening and again on Friday morning, and a few times since, and the test result is the same - I'm still pregnant. The initial shock and disbelief has taken a few days to wear down, and I suspect once the first physical signs start to really kick in, the disbelief is properly gone.

The whole situation is made a bit more difficult by my medical history. I've not been diagnosed with a DVT or any other kind of blood clot yet, but I know from the genetic tests that I've got extremely high probability of getting one, especially when I'm pregnant. I'm likely to be put on prophylactic low molecular weight heparin or some other anticoagulant from weeks 8-12, continuing some weeks after childbirth. This doesn't make me overwhelmed with joy, as the heparin is administered as shots, probably twice a day.

It's weird to be in a situation I frankly didn't believe would ever happen, just hoped it might. I'm almost woefully unprepared mentally for the challenge, but I'm hoping I'm going to do a good attempt. I'll try my darnest to give it the best shot I can. In the future blog posts I'm going to tell you about my experiences of being an immigrant Finn in a foreign country, being pregnant and maybe even about our little family. Me, my husband, and the Larva.