The new normal

9.3.14

     Even in the midst of my sadness, I still had a little one to take care of. At this point, I was grateful that I wouldn't have our second baby here on Kaitlyn's birthday. I felt like it would be harder for me to grieve the way I know I would need to on that day if I were preoccupied with another child.
     When I hit 30 weeks, Dr. B decided that we would start doing Non-Stress Tests (NST) in the office, which is where they hooked me up to two monitors: one for contractions and one for the baby's heart rate. The MA lead me back to a room that was in a "U" shape that contained two dark green recliners in each leg of the "U", each complimented by its own machine to monitor the test.
      For this appointment, I had already seen the baby's heart rate on a sonogram and Dr. B had listened for a minute using a doppler in one of the exam rooms. It was there, when she heard a certain "swoosh" she said, "See, that's the baby moving!" I told her that I had a hard time feeling the movements sometimes, and particularly that day I hadn't felt the baby move much.
      "Okay, let's go ahead and hook you up to a NST. If we don't, you'll probably just go home and worry." So, off I went to the U room and waited to get hooked up to the machine.
       To be honest, I could have laid in that chair all day and listened to this baby's heart beat. It was so comforting just to hear that constant gallop and to hear the swooshes that meant the baby was moving.
       But then, while I sat alone in the room with nothing really to look at but a blank wall, the heart beat stopped.

        It was a sudden stop. I knew that that could only be associated with a roll or a movement of the baby's back away from the probe, but it made my pulse quicken. I started to feel sick because all of a sudden there was the absence of a heart beat on this monitor. I started to talk myself down, "It's okay. You just heard the heart beat on the doppler. You just saw the heart beat on the sonogram. It's okay."

        After a minute of the silence and waiting for the baby to roll back over, I gave up and started moving the probe myself to try to find the heart rate. Eventually, I found the faint noise and pushed the probe into my belly a little further to get a stronger sound.
        It was fine. The heart beat was in the same rate range as it had been earlier, but at that moment I decided I hated NSTs. I felt like I was going to worry more by having to lay here and listen to the heart beat and be the only one in the room. Plus, I hated not having a way to call someone if I felt like the heart rate changed or if there was a sufficient lack of movement.
        But this was the new normal; I would be hooked up to that monitor once a week for the remainder of the pregnancy just to be sure that everything was okay. Because that's how the health care world works. You do the tests to make sure everything is okay because it allows them to "do" something. More monitoring means they are safer. More monitoring means everything is under control...