Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Week 11, Day 1

The due date is July 17, 2012. This, by my calculations, gives me about five months with the little one before the Mayans come and screw our crap up. But that'll be a fun few months.

Today we met with the doctor who will actually be delivering the baby - Dr. Smallwood (Pause). And that dude is a saint. After our 30-minute appointment, I told Kami, "Hey, if you left me for Dr. Smallwood, I wouldn't be happy, but I'd get it."

Due to events previously mentioned, every doctor's visit is an event. We were seeing a doctor closer to where we live, but he doesn't deliver babies anymore, so we checked with our ridiculous insurance company, cross-checked their list with friends of ours who have successfully gotten a child out of their uterus, and came across our new doctor at Baptist Hospital in Nashville.

So this was our third overall appointment. The first doctor was a nice enough guy. He didn't like Kami's shoes (THIS IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE - HE TOLD HER AS MUCH), was a little understated, not very emotional. Which is fine. But we now approach the visit to the Lady Doctor with a sense of dread, akin to going through airport security, and realizing you have a bear trap in your coat pocket.

That first visit was not a big deal. They asked us how we knew we were pregnant (the magic pee stick told us so), asked us some other questions (Note: It's not a good idea to say to the nurse with your wife in the room, "Under the doctor-client privilege, you can't tell my wife I'm here, right?"), took a whole bunch of blood, and sent us on our way.

The next visit was Ultrasound Day, a lot like Truck Day in baseball. Truck Day is the day where baseball teams load up their trucks for Spring Training and drive off to Florida. It's the one semi that I have not wanted to flip off. But ultimately Truck Day just means that something big is coming, it's a reason to get excited, but there's a lot that has to happen between now and then.

They confirmed that she was pregnant (all hail the prophetic power of magic pee stick), and had her Porky Pig it (shirt, no pants) on the table for the ultrasound. I want to be the wholly supportive, sympathetic husband and father-to-be. We had never enjoyed a successful ultrasound. So when the good doctor inserted the, uh, thing into, uh, Kami, the images were basically the same: Negative uterine space, but there were other elements we had not seen before. The Yolk Sac, for instance. The Yolk Sac attaches to the embryo, and provides nourishment to (according to Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information on earth) "bony fishes, sharks, reptiles, birds, and primitive mammals."

"Awesome." I thought. "We're at least having a shark."

But then we saw the flickering of the heart-beat, which incidentally looks a lot like when you're playing Call of Duty, and your guys have that thing on their uniforms that tell you not to shoot them. (Maybe I've got some work to do on this Father thing). When I saw that, I burst into tears, or at least a severe ragweed field, and hugged my bottomless wife.

Today, there was no ultrasound, but the Good Doctor did bring out a Fetal Doppler machine - a device that can externally hear the goings-on of Kami's uterus and can also tell you the precise times that the storm will hit the towns you've never heard of.

The Good Doctor said that, if you hear the heartbeat after ten weeks, the chances of anything going wrong drops down to about 4%, so this would be huge. Also, they can hear the heartbeat of a baby at 11 weeks about 75% of the time. So we proceeded.

The Good Doctor swirled that thing around - with me holding my breath - for what felt like ten minutes. I couldn't breathe, move, think, other than to say "comeoncomeoncomeoncomeon" over and over again. It probably actually only took him about a minute and a half, but we heard a noise not unlike a high-pitched helicopter rotor, and the Good Doctor say, "Bingo."

Now, watch this video:


When I heard the baby's heartbeat, I made a sound very similar to the sound I made when Brian Bogusevic hit the walk-off granny against the Cubs in August 2011, which I was watching on television.

After that visit, they took us in to the room where they tell you about finances. Which is a story that I need to tell another day, because the juxtaposition of Baby Heartbeat and This Is How Much It Will Cost does not need to be in the same post, just as it did not need to be in the same doctor visit.

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