Well, now we know when B will be born: Wednesday 11 April!
We had a visit with the consultant (Dr. MacPherson) from Simpson’s this afternoon. She poked around, and thought that B was lying more breech than oblique breech, which is the way it has been for the last two months. If it had been fully transverse, apparently Abi would have been trundled into the hospital straight away. But the degree if tilt involved, we had the option of trying to get it turned via ECV (External Cephalic Version).
Turning it would be done by a registrar at Simpson’s, in the labour ward, and with full baby monitoring equipment in place. The success rate is approximately 60%, and the risk of the baby getting distressed, and having to be extracted by emergency caesarean is 1 in 1000. However, if it didn’t turn, but instead moved to full breach, the consultant said that they could still try to deliver it normally.
This isn’t quite what we want, though. Abi and I have thought about it a lot, and we would both prefer to just have a simple, straightforward, elective caesarean. A) it’s less painful, and B) we can plan it. The recovery time will be longer, but the whole process is much more controlled, and we both like control. (We consider this whole vaginal birth thing to be a bit, well, primitive. Lois McMaster Bujold writes about uterine replicators in her Barrayar books, in which babies grow to full term outside of the mother’s body. These sound like good things to us.)
So, that’s what’s going to happen. Next Tuesday (10 April) we go in to Simpson’s to see the anaesthesiologist, and to get some blood samples taken (from Abi, not me), and then on Wednesday morning we show up at 09:00, and wait to be seen. We’re third in the queue, so we figure that by Wednesday afternoon we’ll have a baby.
BABYBABYBABYBABY!
I’m so excited! I had to stop myself from bouncing up and down in the doctor’s room this afternoon. I tried to put on my calm, unruffled face, but Abi said I just looked pale and nervous. Oh, well.