Editing Pregnancy (section)

=== Antenatal Monitoring ===

Since Julie has gestational hypertension, she will have antenatal monitoring appointments twice a week starting at 32 w of gestational age.

What they're looking for in these antenatal monitoring appointments is for foetal movement and heart performance. The things our nurse pointed out to us were specifically:

* foetal heart rate
* foetal accelerations: these are short increased heart-rate when the foetus moves
* maternal blood pressure

One thing of note is that insurance usually only covers one ultrasound a day, and since we were getting our 32 w ultrasound the same day an hour later she didn't do one for us.

The reason we had this monitoring is that we had the following risk factors:

* IVF
* Gestational Hypertension (GHT)
* Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM)
* Geriatric Pregnancy

One of the things that is interesting is that Julie's blood pressure measured at these monitoring appointments was quite healthy, ranging from 117/63 to 129/73, which is much better that what we were measuring at home. The nurse suggested that perhaps the cuff isn't correct and that we should bring it in to trial it at the same time.

Another thing the nurse, Susan, pointed out is that babies at this stage have [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/fetus-breathing Foetal Breathing Movements], a good sign for their progression. These are easier to see if you hide the heartbeat from yourself: they're the small body contractions and release like breathing. They were very cool to see.

At one of our 34 w appointments, Julie mentioned to the nurse that she was feeling a mild<ref name=mild-chest-pain/> chest pain. This led to a sequence of events that ended with her in OB triage and then in a room with an EKG device hooked up to her so they could check her heart. Everything came back absolutely normal but it doubled the amount of time it took and we got a lot of unnecessary scans.

Interestingly, this part of the CPMC facility had their blood oxygen meters set to alarm at below 95% and so they did repeatedly as Julie's blood oxygen went between 94 and 98% while on it.

One benefit of these (which go on until pregnancy) is that they are done at the same hospital as we have scheduled delivery. As a result, we autopilot ourselves to the hospital and the process to the same floor as where inducing and labour is done. We're quite familiar with the parking lot etc. as a result.