Thursday, June 17, 2010

Post Surgery Checkup #1

Sorry this is a couple days late. The internet connection here isn't real reliable so I tend to use my phone more than my computer.

Checkup went great.

26 weeks:

Sonogram: Ruth had done a complete flip from when she was in the hospital and is now completely head down. She was butt down in the hospital. Fluid was good, cervix is now back to pre-surgery thickness (it got a little thin right after the surgery), and baby looks good. The did not do all the measurements on her since it was still close to her last ultrasound (when we were in the hospital), but the hind brain herniation looks slightly better, and her ventricles are about the same/stable - which is good! We were told not to get too excited about this, but that is the biggest hopeful benefit to this surgery, is improvement in the brain symptoms.

After that we headed upstairs to meet with Rachel and Tamara (the MOMS nurse coordinators), who gave me "permission" to start walking more. So I can walk around inside the house now (not pushed in a wheel chair), and slowly start increasing the amount I walk elsewhere. Tamara showed us where our next appts where and we ran into Nicole, the other MOMS patient.

OB/Perinatologist appt: I had a super sweet nurse who went over all the new patient info with me. I met with Dr. Cheng today, I saw her some in the hospital and really like her. They didn't do a whole lot in the appt, checked out my incision to make sure it was healing well, took my weight, blood pressure, all the normal stuff. She went over the results of the sonogram with me a little bit. And I was told to go to the lab to do my glucose test, since I hadn't done that before I left Texas.

Anenatal Testing: This is just to monitor the overall well being of the baby. They first did a mini sonogram to look at the fluid, movement of the baby, and if she does any breathing movements. Fluid looked good, Ruth wiggled and kicked her legs, and did some breathing movements! Next they hooked me up to monitors to check the baby's heart rate and if I had any contractions. They are looking for accelerations during movement, which she did some, but the nurse told me they don't expect much with this young of a baby.

So overall, good report for week #1!