I’m thinking of you, Beadalin; I’ve been where you are. Take care.
Good luck Beadalin. I hope everything goes well.
My wife (ex-) spotted when she was pregnant. I just had dinner with the result of that pregnancy. He’s 6’2", approx 230 lbs and 16 years old. Doesn’t seem to’ve bothered him.
I wish all of you pregnant chicks the best of luck.
Mouse-Maven --just FYI: I have hypothryoid. I got it just after the birth of my daughter (who is now 17). I had two more kids with it. They monitored my TSH level during my pregnancies, but that was about all. I would suggest that you go for pre-natal care as scheduled by your health practitioner, eat well, get exercise. The only thing that I can recall from my “low thryoid pregnancies” (my blood levels were all normal, I mean those pregnancies where I was a known hypothyroid pt), was bad constipation.
I hope all goes well for you.
I second or third getting the father to be involved in the worry. This is something that should be shared.
offers hugs and good wishes and tightly crossed fingers for all
One of the great things that having a baby did for my-SiL-the-doctor is teach her how to put things in perspective.
First, she didn’t want to get pregnant (and the fear affected their sex life very badly) for years, because a cousin of her father’s (!) has a degenerative disease that sets on about 50sh and which has been shown to have a genetic component. A test for that gene became available, she took it, negative, suddenly she was all ready to go and have that daughter she’d planned when she was about 5 or 6 yo.
Then she spent months listing every possible complication for mother and child, every known cause of miscarriage, every known link between genetics and anything from alcoholism to the common cold.
Then she found out her upcoming daughter was a son and got angry at the world and spent a couple months claiming that she didn’t want to have a son because she’ll never be able to bond with a son because a son won’t like “nice clothes”, at which point someone would point out that any daughter of her husband will, by definition, be MY niece and may take after Auntie Nava, who hates frills and lace and bows.
Then she sort of got over it but still pouted a lot.
Then one of the ultrasounds was kind of funny in a kidney (I swear, nowadays we overtest). And she instantly latched onto the worst possible diagnosis, one which kills half the people who have it before age 10 and is completely asymptomatic in the other half. Of course, his son was going to have this, and was going to be in the first half.
OK, it turned out that one of The Nephew’s urethers doesn’t want to stay open, he’s going to have surgery to fix it. This is not life-threatening at all, so once they got a diagnosis SiL said “I’ve been worrying myself half to death over this?” The pediatrical surgeon: “hey, better than worrying over something real bad :D” My great-grandma had that same problem and she died at 96, and as far as we know the worst illness she ever suffered was a flu. Since the Proud Daddy doesn’t know about his great-grandma’s kidney, Mom has asked me not to mention it (she doesn’t want it to somehow become a weapon any time the kid coughs too hard).
Whether it’s a miscarriage or not, all I can tell you is that I hope it gets solved soon and that I send my best wishes.
I just want to include my good wishes for all the prego Dopers, and tell you not to worry too much, even though I know you’ll worry anyway. You’ll worry about the pregnancy, and then when the baby’s born you’ll worry about food intake and growth and development.
Then the baby will start school and you’ll worry about grades and bullies and friends. And in a few years the kid will take up skateboarding or something and will spend all his/her spare time flinging himself or herself off of stationary objects, and then you have to worry about keeping the cast clean and dry and the limb immobilized.
And after that you’ve got junior high and high school, with the peer pressure and the alcohol and the drugs and the dating and the sex and the Attititude (junior high is when my name changed from “Mom” to “Moth-er!” with a side of rolleyes, although I must say my 8 year old daughter has already started doing this, but she started talking and crawling early, too - what can I say, the child’s gifted :dubious: ). Then they get their driver’s licenses and you have no choice but to let them go out running around in command of a half a ton of screaming metal potential Death.
Then they go to college, or find a job and move out, and you no longer have any control over what they do, and for the first time you don’t know where they are every minute of the day.
So you worry about where they might be and what they may be doing.
Honestly, I don’t know why more of us don’t have drinking problems.
Ah, the memories those comments bring back. I spent most of my pregnancy sprawled out in a papasan chair (towards the end, I couldn’t extricate myself without assistance) despairing over baby books … “oh-my-god-this-is-hard-I-CANNOT-DO-THIS-there-is-no-way-I-can-do-the-things-I-have-to-do-to-be-a-good-parent-I’m-too-screwed-up-to-be-that-good-at-nurturing.”
A low point was reading a page-long how-to guide on choosing baby shoes, suggesting that failure to obtain and follow professional guidance in this area would deform your child for life. Y’know, there is No. Way. I am capable of the feats of concentration, memory and persistence that would be required to follow a 600-word set of instructions on picking a baby shoe.
I think I cried then.
But it is okay now. My son just turned nine. I never followed the shoe-buying instructions. His feet are not deformed. And he is a great kid, kind, gentle, funny, smart and wonderful.
You’ll be fine as a parent. You don’t have to be perfect, just love your kid a lot and be sure s/he knows it.
PS - You wanna hear a REAL admission of bad parenting instincts? I never could tell a “hungry” cry from any other cry when my kid was an infant, although supposedly moms are supposed to glom on to the difference immediately. He just … cried.
For general bitching about this sort of thing. Ugh.