The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I had a 12 week prenatal appointment, and the heartbeat sounds normal, so that's good.
They also drew 5 vials of blood without much explanation, which has happened with previous pregnancies as well. There was a new questionnaire about belonging to groups with higher than usual genetic risks, which included Ashkenazi, which I had heard of, as well as certain Asan groups and French Quebecois, which I hadn't heard of before. There were no questions about my gender, which appeared two years ago. The position of the ultrasound scheduling office is "don't call us, we'll call you."
That seems like too much blood
I was surprised. It looks like they're doing blood cell counts, antibody counts, and insulin tests. I guess maybe they wanted some more blood on hand, just in case something was off?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Happy to hear that. Do they actually tend to postpone the scheduling quite a lot, or do they just not want to be bothered by nagging worried first-timers? On the blood, you can get a surprising amount of information just from the mother's blood, so that seems reasonable to me. Though it's weird they don't mention it, we usually got told explicitly that the blood values look good/not good, but presumably that means everything is fine for you. My wife has chronic low iron values unless she eats way more meat than she likes to.
We recently had the big checkup ultrasound (around 14-16 weeks, dunno how it varies by country, I presume not much?) for our second and everything came out fine which was a great relieve. My wife got cortisone in the first few weeks of the pregnancy when we didn't know, which increases the chance of lip/facial clefts + I have a minor facial cleft myself, so we were worried about that - genetic and environmental risks generally add up quite well unfortunately. We're also moving into the age bracket where major disabilities become frighteningly common.
Congratulations on your wife's pregnancy!
Maybe the person who schedules the ultrasounds is out this week or something? They also work with students, so last time I got two slightly longer appointments where an ultrasound student did the exam under guidance, so it's possible the scheduling is a bit complicated. They do an anatomy scan at 18-20 weeks, and sometimes look at something at 10 weeks, but I've never managed to get an appointment in time for that, though I probably could if I really insisted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link