Friday, January 28, 2005 (Perth - Australia)
All our prenatal worries put to rest at the
nearby hospital. Our first child's first photo. More blood pumping. Confiding in
a nun. Learning all we can about pregnancy.
Day 326 (136). The joys of travelling, with no
job, no bills to pay or any other care in the world, afforded us yet another
long lie in this morning. Isn’t life hard? With fresh food in the kitchen
today, we managed to make and eat breakfast when we were finally up and about.
Sandy was keen for us to get off to the prenatal clinic at the hospital with the
doctor’s referral letter, where we would hopefully get some definitive
answers to some of our lingering questions about Sandy’s pregnancy and our
situation.
The hospital is just ten
minutes drive from the city centre, although setting off in the completely wrong
direction to begin with converted this into a half-hour drive. We’re now
getting very good at getting very lost. All the staff at the hospital were
absolutely excellent. Everyone made us feel very comfortable. Right from the
get-go, we were told that everything would be taken care of today. All our
questions would be answered and all the necessary prenatal examinations would be
carried out. We filled in a few forms and were quickly seen by one of the
nurses, who noted all our questions and fears and was very good at extracting
all the necessary information from us both about our history and so on. We then
waited for about five minutes in an examination room before the midwife came in.
She was a very motherly figure and immediately put us at ease by confirming that
we had absolutely nothing to worry about with regards to the Doxicycline. They
had already spoken to a couple of pharmacists and confirmed that the only issue
would have been if Sandy was taking the medication after about sixteen weeks of
pregnancy. She then wheeled over the sonogram trolley and gave Sandy and
abdominal ultrasound examination. Sandy is extremely pregnant, just as the
previous tests indicated. Not only could we see the foetus but we could also
make out the heart beating. The midwife took some measurements and concluded
that the foetus was seven weeks and about four days old. By her calculations,
sandy is due to give birth on or around September 10th. We are now
planning to be home by around the third week in April, so this will give us a
good four months or more to prepare. Hopefully, that should be enough to find a
job, earn some money and take care of business. The midwife continued to have a
good look around but was extremely pleased that everything was as it should be
at this stage. She voiced this in a way that was reassuring for us
both.
Her parting words to us were to
go and get a good lunch and to enjoy the rest of our travels. She gave us a
special form that we can take with us to record all the prenatal tests results,
measurements and so on onto. As we move from country to country, this form will
have all the information that any doctor, hospital or gynaecologist will need to
see at a glance. We went into the hospital anxious and nervous but came out as
beaming parents to be. With a printout of the sonogram, we now also have the
first photo of our baby – at just thirteen millimetres (a shade over half
an inch) long.
We went back into town
and back to the same pathology lab from yesterday to get all the prenatal blood
screenings done. We’ll collect the results ourselves this time directly
from the lab and add those to the form we were given at the hospital. We will
probably see a gynaecologist when we are in Melbourne to go over the test
results and to perform another sonogram. Because of our ages, we are in a higher
risk category for Down syndrome and so another sonogram at twelve weeks is
advised. They will be checking for something called the nuchal transparency,
which apparently has something to do with the thickness of the spinal
cord.
The technician at the pathology
lab drained another five vials of blood from Sandy’s left arm and we went
off to find out where the St. John of God convent was located. We had about an
hour to find out where it was and get to it to make our two o’clock
appointment with Sister Jacinta. We asked for directions at an information booth
in the middle of town. Quite ironically, the convent was located just a
stone’s throw from the hospital we had just returned from. We made it
there with a few minutes to spare and sat in the car reading prenatal leaflets
for a while to kill time.
Sister
Jacinta is a lovely and warm person in whom we didn’t mind confiding our
little secret. There’s just something about a nun that compels you to bear
all. It almost felt therapeutic to finally tell someone of our news. We spent an
hour in her company and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. She is an old woman, much
older than I had expected in fact, but had a very sharp mind and keen intellect.
She and her sister, Mary, share a lot in common in that they are bother very
caring and warm-hearted people.
We
bid farewell to Sister Jacinta and went back into town again. We’d past a
few bookshops whilst in town and both of us gravitated towards the family and
maternity section to browse the books there. We went back to pick out a few and
have spent much of the rest of the day back in our hostel reading through them
all. It suddenly feels like our lives are moving towards being all about
Sandy’s pregnancy as opposed to our travels. I’ve heard people say
that having children changes your lives drastically and also it means that many
things will be out of your reach from that point onwards. This is often
qualified by stating that having children changes your perspective on life to
the extent that those things that become out of reach are no longer considered
as relevant or important anymore anyway. Could we be seeing this change in
mindset in the two of us already? Perhaps I will come back to that point in the
days and weeks to come to see if it is
true.
We cooked and ate a light meal
this evening and spent the rest of the time sitting in the lounge and reading
through all the new books we purchased today. They are very good books and seem
to be agreeing on most issues. One thing that has become evident has been that
all the signs of pregnancy have been there over the past couple of weeks.
Neither of us, however, put two and two together until Sandy took the pregnancy
test back in Atherton. Now that we have educated ourselves a bit more on the
subject, it seems so highly unlikely that we missed it to begin with. Perhaps we
were just having too much fun travelling.
Posted: Fri - January 28, 2005 at 11:39 PM