A week of appointments

This week has been the busiest week so far of my pregnancy.

On Tuesday I had my 16 week bloods done, including a GTT (Glucose Tolerance Test) - one of the reasons I had to have this is because I'm overweight, and they want to check that my body is still making insulin ok.

Surprisingly (because I suck at paying attention to what's written in letters) I only expected this to be a quick blood test, but when I got there and read the letter, I realised it was at least a 2-hour ordeal.  The appointment was for 8:30, we arrived nice and early at 8:20 and was ready to have my blood take right there and then.  But it wasn't until 8:35 that they managed to draw blood, why?  Because I have terrible veins that collapse as soon as a needle gets near them, and they're tiny, so they're really hard to find.

I had 3-4 people try to take blood from me and they eventually got it from the back of my hand (which is where I told them they'd need to take it from in the first place).  So after 3 stab-wounds (one in my arm, 2 in the back of my hand) I was whisked off to my next appointment.  I had my wee dipped, my BP done (something like 143/85 - pretty average for me) and I was weighed.

After that, I had an appointment with the consultant since I'm having a consultant-led pregnancy due to weight, heart problem (SVT) and my underactive thyroid.  We had to wait for about an hour to be seen, but the consultant was lovely.  She's put me on 75mcg of aspirin as a preventative measure in the hopes I don't develop pre-eclampsia.

I was due to have the downs blood test too... now, I'm going to speak really frank and candidly about this.  When we found out I was pregnant we decided we wanted the downs test.  Ultimately, after long talks, we knew we would terminate if the test was positive (a horrible thought I know).  But when it came down to it, while we were in the hospital I just didn't want to know.  If it came back as high risk, I wasn't prepared to have the amino and then I'd be stressed for the rest of the pregnancy about our baby - we'd rather take my chances and live in ignorance.

After seeing the consultant I had another appointment to see the endocrinologist (hormone specialist - i.e. thyroids).  She increased my dose of thyroxine from 150 (which had been increased since pregnancy) to 175.  Then I was whisked back to have my second blood test as part of the GTT, again from the back of my hand.

Next we had to cash in my prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy, this took aaaaages, over a 1hr wait!

Well, that was Tuesday.  Then today (Thursday) I had my 16 week midwife appointment, this was very short and sweet.  The midwife once again took my blood pressure which was a brilliant 130/80 (perfect!) and sent me on my way.

All in all a very busy baby week!

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