Yesterday marked the 20-week border. This is officially the halfway point of a full-term 40 week pregnancy. For us, though, it’s the commencement of the officially hardest and scariest month of all. From here to 24 weeks, we are crossing a large gulf to viability. The 22-week point, of course, is the supremely most scary part for us, just psychologically, because it harkens back to our loss five years ago. But Thursday we got to see our beautiful baby, all 14 ounces of him or her. (We did not find out!) All the beautiful little parts, the lovely 4-chambered and perfect steadily beating heart, two-lobed brain, five-fingered hands, and tiny lively kicking feet. This month is the month the baby can be as large and fully formed as possible while still being completely unable to survive ex utero. It also it is a time when the baby is becoming truly “present”– lots of kicking that I can feel all the time and the general sense of midriff expansion becoming completely impossible to deny. June 23rd, or 24 weeks, will be the viability milestone; if born then the baby could survive, barely, theoretically, and with massive neonatal intensive care. July 21st or 28 weeks is more like it, but a beacon so far away.
Most of the time I’ve been able to maintain my composure and good cheer about all this. I’m busy and distracted by Isaac most of the time. Yet I have my moments. On Thursday our doctor just fleetingly mentioned the emotional importance of 22 weeks and I surprised all by bursting into tears. (Hormones I suppose are not helping…) At certain times I feel sort of like we’re stepping out on one of those rickety rope bridges strung over a burbling lake of lava. It could hold. I might hold. It probably WILL hold! The last guy got across it! Right? Yes! Okay… One step at a time…
But that being said this 20-week check-up was really as good as it could be. There are no further signs of abruption. (“What abruption?” the technician said. “Yay!” we cried.) It’s just healed up wonderfully on its own. (Stopping the cough did seem to do the trick!) The baby’s growth and everything else about it seem to be completely perfect. The future cannot be predicted, but everything is going very well. I need to rest a lot more than your usual pregnant lady, finding as I do that “overdoing it” at all causes mild contractions. I find myself on something of a short leash, contractions-wise. Walking up the stairs once, no problem. Three times… um… no. I find that the intersection of high-risk pregnancy and highly-active three-year-old boy is a tricky one to navigate. Yesterday, for instance, Isaac (and therefore I) slept only from 1 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. and then got up to rush about. I did have a baby sitter coming for the morning, but a different doctor appt across town that took up most of the time. I figured though that Isaac just would simply have to collapse in the afternoon and allow me to sleep. But no– the babysitter left at noon and he was still a live wire for HOURS. I tried every known strategy to get him to calm down and ADMIT how exhausted he had to be. Finally at about 3:30 I put him in the car and he did fall asleep while driving around. But after carrying him in and laying him down on the couch, I found that I was really cramping and having low-grade contractions from the marathon. (They went away, though, shortly after I lay down and napped.)
I’m thankful that our doctor does not believe in bedrest and in fact advocates publicly against it. Bless him. I’ve only tried it for 3-4 days at a time in my 2001 pregnancy, but it was a worse fate than you can imagine. What’s the big deal, you ask? Why would it not be fun to lie down 24/7 when you feel just fine? Well… for starters you need a personal assistant with you all the time– a staff of maids, cooks, and housekeepers would be quite useful. While pregnant with Isaac I trained our dog Lena to fetch things for me that I indicated around the room with a laser pointer, which became a charming parlor trick, but luckily I never had to actually use it while confined to horizontal. Beyond the inconvenience, though, there’s the muscle atrophy. The bone loss. The depression. The fact that it’s not actually proven to help pregnancies go longer. (There’s a wonderful support group that helped me a lot when I was pregnant with Isaac– a national buddy system for women lying on their left sides for months and others simply coping with high-risk pregnancy. It’s at sidelines.org) I truly hope to get all the way through this without that…
But the doctor did caution me, repeatedly, soberly, to take it easy and listen to myself. “You know yourself better than anyone. Don’t over do it. Make someone else do the dishes! Put Isaac in a safe room and let him cry if you have to.” etc. It is true that I do know when I cross the line. It’s just so maddenly easy to do these days. So far I’ve found that simply sitting or lying down and having some water to drink makes the contractions go away. The fear is that, one of these times, they WON’T go away so easily.
Also, the doctor said ixnay on the traveling from here on out. I said that I was hoping to go to Minneapolis in about 4 weeks and he said, bluntly, “You want to be in a hospital in Minneapolis?” to which of course I said, “um, now that you mention it, no.” He’s not keen on the flying itself, but really it’s just the being that far away from the nest at a time of potential need. It’s true. If anything happened I would not want to be out there trying to get my entire medical history faxed and without my trusty familiar medical team around me. So the trip to Minne is not gonna happen.
Similarly, plans to gut and renovate the kitchen this July-August are seeming now a little grandiose. It’s just the pull of powerful hatred for our current hell kitchen of 8 years on the one hand, and the siren song of a whole new SUNNY BIG kitchen, that is so, so powerful. We’ve gotten so close, too! Designs in the vault, bids completed, and a contractor on deck. But… what IF I do get into trouble and need bedrest– how fun would that be in a sea of dust and roaring skill saws? Renovation vagrancy looks a lot worse when in a medical situation. The other thing is that the timing is so tight, like– ZERO margin of error. We do like and trust our contractors, but if his estimated 7 weeks goes more like 9 or 12 … as these things so often do… we would really be in a complete mess… Isaac starting school, his life upside down, the house torn up, and a new baby here early! Good lord. No. We really lost January-May to illness and pregnancy issues on my part. I just couldn’t keep the project moving for those months. And it turns out that those months were very crucial to getting it all done this summer.
Also I should point out that Isaac’s design sensibilities are incredibly conservative. He loathes all change. We put a new rug down in the living room and he had a huge crying and kicking fit. “You’ll get used to it!” I tried to consol him. “I’ll never get used to it!” he screamed. (It turns out he was right– the rug was all wrong and we’ve since gotten rid of it.) I think that tearing up the kitchen and putting in a new one, right about the same time he’s also starting school, and becoming a big brother, well, it’s just too much all at once. I try to keep his future therapy bill in mind at times at all times, and this pile-on of change just seems like a recipe for psychological trauma.
Oh Well!
So our consolation prizes are that now that we have a design we can at least finally get new appliances that will for sure fit in that design. A new stove and a new fridge will cheer us up a great deal. And there’s no reason not to do at least the external phase of the project, getting a back porch and new back door (because we’re going to eventually close off an entry point that now leads into the kitchen). Sigh, sigh, sigh. Well– chalk it up to more time to look at swatches and research counter tops!
So in just a short office visit, the summer has been redrawn and pulled into focus. The focus is: BABY. Okay. Makes a lot of sense actually. And seeing his or her adorable little profile that morning makes everything else seem utterly trivial.