Sunday, September 11, 2011

Almost Time for the Baby

Well, we just had our latest doctor's appointment on Thursday and found out that our baby is comfortable sitting with its head up - breech. Normally at this time the baby is with its head down and getting ready for a normal birth, which in our case would be in about another month. Our little one decided that he/she wanted to make things interesting. We found out at the doctor that if the baby isn't in a head down position that we will need to schedule a c-section. For a c-section they recommend that you schedule it 1-2 weeks before your actual due date as they would rather you not go into labor so things can be more planned out. Right now Katy is 37 weeks pregnant and the baby is considered full term even though she isn't at her due date yet. So, we are trying to decide when, what week and day, would be the best to have the baby (as it could be in just over 2 weeks).
There is something they can do, called a cephalic version, to manually help try and move the baby. A doctor uses his hands and pushes on the stomach of the mother to help the baby turn and get into a head down position. This would enable the mother to have 'normal' birth. The doc said that this would be done in the hospital and Katy would be monitored with machines to make sure everything is going well for the baby. There are some risks to the placenta or umbilical cord, but with monitoring they would be able to see if there is a problem. I guess they have had some success, about 50%, with this and the doctor said we should talk it over and decide if it something that we want to do. I guess the procedure can take as little as 30 seconds, or it could take much longer. I've included a link to a YouTube video to give you an idea of what a cephalic version is like.
The doc said they have done hundreds of them at the hospital here in town and only a few times has there been something that has gone wrong where they needed to do an emergency c-section. Obviously you don't think anything will go wrong, but I guess we have learned to be prepared for anything (we would need to be ready for the baby when we went in for the cephalic version just in case) as we just assumed everything would go like it should and the baby would be head down awaiting its birth into the world at this time. So depending on what we decide to do, and I guess what the baby decides to do, we could have a baby in as little as two weeks or as late 4+ weeks.

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