Thursday, December 2, 2010

The plot thickens ..... Twins !!!!

God must be laughing when I wrote my previous blog post titled 'Relatively Quiet and Uneventful days' because only 48 hours later, we got a huge dose of exciting development in our lives.

On Sunday evening, I was talking to my wife about how I was feeling a little anxious that we hadn't seen the baby or heard it's heartbeat in the ultrasound yet. To top it off, S's morning sickness had almost gone away which added to my worry (instead of being grateful about it). So I convinced her to get an ultrasound the very next morning and boy we were in for a surprise.

We're having twins !! Yess ... Identical twins!! These maybe only three words and may take a second to say to someone, but it takes a while to really let it sink in. There's a wide range of emotions the you feel, starting from being surprised, to happiness and then to worry and then repeat over and over again. We've been in a daze for the last 2 days. I mean suddenly you start putting an extra 's' after the word 'kid' or 'baby' every time you say 'our kids' or 'our babies' etc. Try looking a a crying baby after that, and you can't help but thinking what it would be to have two crying babies like next to each other :P

For first time parents like us, there's an additional kick. I think all expectant parents have at least some degree of concern about how good parents they will be ... That insecurity kind of gets multiplied by two when you hear about twins. But I'm excited about having twins now. It'll be fun you know. It's one of the rare blessings of Allah and I'm really happy about it. Come to think of it, we might even be able to get bulk discount on diapers now. I can't wait for our babies to come out and join our family.

The good news comes with a twist however. Our kids are monochorionic diamniotic twins, which means they're sharing the same placenta. Plus, we have early signs of placenta previa. Both of these can cause pre-term labor and some other complications. Since we did not know much about these terms, I've read a lot of information on the web and apparently the best thing to do is to stay positive and stay away from the internet because it just causes a lot of unnecessary stress for things that we cannot control at this time. We live in an under developed country and even though our doctor and the medical facilities are the best in this country, I still want to get enough information from the internet so that I'm completely knowledgeable about the issues, treatments and ways to detect these problems. I'm sure our doctor Lumaan Sheikh and our sonologist are going to get really mad at me asking a lot of questions through out the next few months.

Today S and I went to her university so that she could drop her courses this semester from college. Its a shame because this was her last semester before she got her undergraduate degree, with only 2 months left. Still, she needs to rest as much as possible to avoid any complications.
And maybe it's just my perception, but S's belly seems a lot bigger since the last two days :D

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Relatively Quiet and Uneventful days

Now that the initial excitement has worn off, life has become pretty much gone back to normal except for S's mood changes. With less than two month remaining for her thesis to end, she has been working a lot.  Plus having to fight sudden bouts of morning sickness leaves her pretty much drained. By the end of most days, she's ready to hit the sack early to get ready for the next day.

So one of my favorite activities these days after S goes to bed is to browse through the babycenter.com resources and forums. They've got these forums where all the parents who have their expected delivery date in a particular month come together. It's really cool to hear from all these people who are going through the exact same thing that we are going through.  I've been learning a lot of new terminology (which I admit took a while to figure out) ... for example somebody would say something like
'My DH and I decided to tell our DD (who is 4) about the new LO coming into our lives and the EDD'

See .. I totally wrote that myself ... I'm so proud of my self ... haha

Our ultrasound date is Dec 2nd. We haven't heard the baby's heartbeat yet. So we're very excited about this u/s. S will be just about 10 week then, so hopefully, we'll see some baby body features in the u/s instead of just big blob.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

The first doctor’s visit and the first ultrasound

A lot of people kept telling us that it was too early to go see a doctor. My argument was: we don’t even know how far along S is. It could either be 6 weeks or either 10 weeks. As always, I overcame the resistance we decided to go see Dr. Khalida Khanum. By that time we had also gotten the hCG results back from the lab, which put us somewhere around 6-7 weeks. But we weren’t backing off and decided to keep our doctor’s appointment for the next day.

The doctor’s office was a strange scene. A lot of middle aged women (many of them memon speaking) were sitting there, almost none of the husbands were there and I was the only guy I saw in my 45 minutes there who actually went into the doctor’s office with their wives.  I half expected somebody to stop me from going inside. And I was ready to argue my way inside :P

The doctor wasn’t sure either about how many weeks its been, so she asked us to get an ultrasound. I had a I-Told-You-So smug smile on my face as we walked out of there.  Over all the doctor seemed fine, she asked us to come back after 1 month.  One fun fact …. This doctor delivered two of my cousins who are now almost 20 years old  :D

We went straight to South City hospital for the ultrasound, with a quick stop at KFC. Now I don’t know whether this is because of the pregnancy or S is using this to her advantage …. But she’s been feeling hungry a lot. So obviously we had to stop and get something to eat. The ultrasound lady didn’t let me in, and I had to wait outside

The ultrasound revealed that it’s been 5.5 weeks only. She could see the sac, but couldn’t see the fetus because it was too early. We’ll go back after 10 days to get another ultrasound.

Btw, babcycenter.com puts our due date to be July 1st, 2011. I discovered these awesome inside pregnancy videos http://www.babycenter.com/2_inside-pregnancy-weeks-1-to-9_10302602.bc

Monday, November 1, 2010

HCG Count 11,000 and the joys of internet

About five days ago, I did not know much about different stages of pregnancy and things that go along with it. Then came the positive pregnancy test and I did what a normal (meaning nerdy) software engineer would do to learn about something new. I started googled stuff.

There's soooo much information online that things get dizzy after a while. Since we're not exactly sure how many months S is along ... I convinced everybody ( i.e my mom and S's mom and S) that we HAD to get a quantitative HCG blood test done. We went to AKUH lab for the test this morning. The reports generally are to be collected at the end of the next day. But due to the really awesome online report feature of AKUH, we were able to check the results online around 9pm today.

Her HCG count is 11,098 mIU/ml and according to the following chart, puts her somewhere in her 6th or 7th week.

Week from the Last Menstrual Period Amount of HCG in mIU/ml
3 5 -50
4 3 - 426
5 19 - 7,340
6 1,080 - 56,500
7 - 8 7,650 - 229,000
9 - 12 25,700 - 288,000
13 - 16 13,300 - 254,000
17 - 24 4,060 - 165,400
25 - 40 3,640 - 117,000

We're planning to go see a gynecologist tomorrow. Maybe she'll be able to hear the heartbeat of the baby :D

Sunday, October 31, 2010

It's going to be a boy !!!???!!!

According to the ancient Chinese Pregnancy Calendar ..... our baby is going to be a boy !!
My sister told me about this calendar and she found that it was accurate for both her kids.

Here's what the internet says about this technique:
This Chinese gender prediction chart was supposedly discovered in a tomb, and is rumored to be over seven centuries old. (The original is said to be on display at the Beijing Institute of Science in China.) How accurate is it? Reports vary -- so don't paint the nursery based on the results -- but it's still fun to see what is predicted for you! 
Here's a link to the calendar http://goo.gl/HGB7

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Yayyy ... The results are in ...

Two pink lines

On four different pregnancy tests over the period of 36 hours ... all positive ... I think we can start celebrating now. Even though there's a nagging feeling urging me to be more cautious ... after all, we haven't had an official lab test done yet and we havent even seen a doctor yet.

But that didn't stop me from asking S to start a search for a good gyno.
And banning all Cola drinks for her and having her take folic acid supplements.

The first lab results come in tonight ... can't wait!