Doctor's Visit 9/11/07

Look at me, I'm a posting fiend now that the secret is out! I went to the doctor today, he said everything is fine, my heart sounds good, we heard the baby's heartbeat, it's all good. I just realized that some of my readers might need a little explanation as to why I mentioned that my heart sounds good. It's a complicated story, I'll try to shorten it as much as possible.

When I was 9, I got rheumatic fever. It was not a pleasant experience, lots of doctors visits and medications to decrease the swelling in my heart, and I was out of school for about 4 months. As a result, I have a heart murmur. It actually hasn't affected my life much at all for the last 15 years, I had regular check-ups with my pediatric cardiologist until I was 18, and then I was told I should go to an adult cardiologist every 3 years or so. And that is it. I just go, they check it out, no big deal. Well, I came due for an appointment this year, so I went in to the cardiologist here in St George in April, Dr. Chander is his name. Very nice man. He checked everything out, and said my heart was a little bit weaker than he would like. He prescribed some medication, and that was that.

Then my OBGYN got the cardiology report back. You see, we had been trying to conceive for 2 years, and we were doing some infertility treatments. He called me in and said, "Well, this doesn't look good for pregnancy. You should just adopt instead." Talk about a change in plans! And so we decided to follow his advice, and we looked into adoption. Lo and behold, one month later, BAM, Baby Blockburger decides to come into our lives. We were a bit surprised. But in a good way. Anyway, I am a high risk pregnancy, and I've got all sorts of doctors. Dr. Gonzales is the Maternal/Fetal Medicine doctor, Dr. Fagnant is my OB (he's the man I get to see once a week for check-ups), and Dr. Chander is my cardiologist. And Dr. Astle is my regular OBGYN, but he decided that his office wasn't well equipped for my pregnancy, so he turned all care over to the other guys.

So there you go. And that was the short version! Things look good right now, the heart shouldn't be an issue until later in pregnancy, when I have all this extra blood pumping through my system. The big issue right now is dehydration, so we're trying to get that under control. Wow, this is a mother of a post already, so I'm going to finish up. I think most of you already knew all this, but I just wanted to make sure that we didn't have anyone in the dark.