Biophysical US @ 32 wks
Continuing since our 30th-week appointment, we are going to have weekly ultrasounds. Usually this wouldn’t happen until week 36, but seeing as we are a special case we get to go more often. Starting at this appointment, we also have weekly fetal non-stress tests. I had no idea what this was but I get to sit in a chair for 20-30 minutes with 2 monitors strapped to my belly. One is for measuring contractions and one measures the fetal heartbeat. I am given a button (think Jeopardy-type buzzer) that I have to press every time I feel Evan move. They are looking for a correlation of Evan moving plus an increase in his heart rate within a set amount of time. Evan passed with flying colors. His heart may be bojangled but dammit it works awesome. Lil fella is going to be alright after all. 🙂
The ultrasounds we have now are called biophysical ultrasounds. It just means they are looking at his overall development. They don’t take any measurements except for amniotic fluid levels. A couple weeks ago it was suspected that the ventricles in his brain were too large so they also measured these. We weren’t worried then and it turns out that he is growing into them just fine. They appear pronounced but measure normally, so there are no other indications of any problems. He was again head-down facing my right side, which explains why I suddenly get shooting pains on my right side and rib area. Of course we couldn’t get a profile pic because both his hands and a foot were in front of his face. Plus it is only getting more and more crowded so the likelihood of getting a nice profile ever again is getting slim. We did notice his little hand holding onto something and it was the umbilical cord. When we zoomed back a little bit we could see that he was not only holding onto it but sucking on it like a paci. We could see his little chin moving and everything. Very cool.
Thanks Mom for coming with me to my appointment. I’m really happy that not only I got to share him with you but also you got to experience your first US. Only a couple weeks left until we meet him in real life. 🙂
Here the tech points out the hand, with the fingers on top and it resting in his palm. Nice fat little arm too. If you squint a little you can see that the dark part in his grip is the cord itself.
Zoomed out, to the right you can see the highlighted region of his forehead and start of nose. The flicker of white in the middle of the image was his little chin moving. Too bad he was being a little stinker and wouldn’t give us a better shot.
