8 Week Ultrasound

I had the early ultrasound with the ectopic scare and it felt like ages for the 8 week ultrasound. Anyone else feel that pregnancy is a torturous waiting game?!

It finally was time and I was so glad that I had some friends mention that you need to drink a lot of water before an ultrasound. It wasn’t mentioned in my appointment reminder (or I just missed it) that you needed a full bladder so it was easier to see the baby in the uterus.

We went over some basics and I could ask questions. I didn’t have too many questions since I had a call with one of the nurses before this appointment. I mostly wanted to verify if I needed to reheat the pizza the day after if it had deli meat on it versus eating cold. The answer was yes, reheat. Some other questions I asked in the call were based on exercise and about being on your back for longer periods of time. I sleep on my back right now and have ever since my hip overuse injury…and this sounds so silly…but I was getting lash extensions and I lay on my back for 45 min to an hour. I wanted to know if that was still feasible. It doesn’t matter too much anymore because I just recently ended up cancelling all my future lash appointments. Baby costs are already adding up so much and now I’m trying to save where I can.

Then finally the moment we were waiting for came…the ultrasound. There was a little blob that the nurse said had a normal heartbeat. I was ecstatic. It was all that I wanted to hear. (PS…Dave has been getting into wildlife photography and he might have been a little excited that the baby looked like a little owl peeping at us!)

I had to give a urine sample, got some blood drawn and we were off. It was starting to feel real that we are going to have a baby. I simply could not wait any longer to tell the news. I decided to let my work group and others know that Monday. I knew it was a little risky telling them only at 8 weeks but seeing the heartbeat made me feel some hope. I also decided that I always want to try to help women speak about the challenges we have. Miscarriage, fertility and other pregnancy challenges are included in that. If for some terrible reason I ended up struggling, I knew that I would need support from my friends and coworkers and also would like to let others know how common it is. I know so many people personally who have struggled from infertility and miscarriages. When I was younger, I didn’t realize how common it was, but as I got older and more of my friends were trying to have children, I was in shock how many people I knew who had miscarriages or struggled with fertility. A lot of the times, these people suffer in silence an I think it’s important to for us to grow more empathy with what others might be going through.