Worst. Doctor's. Appointment. Ever. Avery has been freaking out whenever both John and I leave the apartment, so I gave John his first ever pass from coming to a doctor's appointment. Boy did that come back to bite me in the butt. The waiting room was PACKED when I got in, with standing room only for a lot of very pregnant women. Don't get me started on how angry I was that not a single father/grandmother/child/barely pregnant woman offered to give up their seat for the rest of us. Our regular resident was again unavailable. The system we signed up for was to see the same resident and attending physician every time, but our resident never seems to be around. Most of the time this has worked out just fine, I see a different resident but the same attending, so there is always a little consistency. Not today. Totally different resident, totally different attending. The resident finally came into the room after I'd been waiting an hour, told me that I was measuring 35 weeks (not 37.5 as I should be) and that the baby weighed about 5 pounds, but that I shouldn't worry because that was in normal range. The attending came in and was told this information and completely freaked out, said that the baby was WAY too small, that I'd have to go in for an ultrasound to determine what was wrong with the baby, and lots of scary possibilities I didn't need to hear. The attending finally decided to check me herself and realized that the resident had measured incorrectly, that the baby was just "all over the place", not tucked nicely, and was probably over six pounds, as he/she should be.
Then I got a couple of nice lectures about how I needed to eat more calcium and why in the world hadn't I already figured out what birth control we were going to use after the birth. That latter lecture was a nightmare and a half, but I'll spare you the details. Oh, and as they were walking out of the room they remembered to tell me that they had detected that I was bleeding. But it is probably just a bladder infection, maybe, we'll wait a see a week to see how that develops.
I guess I've been lucky that I never had any real reason to worry about the baby this entire pregnancy. But this last appointment has added more stress than I'm really ready for this late in the game. Everything is probably fine- the baby really isn't that small, and whatever is causing the bleeding doesn't seem to affect the baby as my non-stress tests have always been great, the baby is moving around a lot, and his/her heartrate was normal. The appointment was just handled poorly and left me feeling like I was doing something terribly wrong. I can't wait to see my regular resident/attending, which unfortunately might never happen as they aren't available for appointments until my due date!
