NST and BPP

This morning we went to the hospital for two tests, just to make sure everything is still okay in there.

The first was a non-stress test. It was basically two flat disks strapped to my belly, one to monitor contractions, and one to monitor the baby's heart rate. I'm not sure about this, but I think if the heart rate gets too low during a contraction, that indicates a problem. They let it run for about 20 minutes. D-husband and I watched the monitors the whole time, even though we really weren't sure what any of the numbers meant. It was pretty easy to see which monitor was which though, and at one point the contraction monitor really spiked! I didn't feel a thing, but when we felt my belly it was very firm. As it went down, my belly got softer. It was so weird! The heart rate went up just a little bit, actually, but of course, I'm not the doctor so I tried not to worry about any of it. Didn't have another contraction the rest of the time we were in there.

The next test was a biophysical profile. It's an ultrasound, and looks for a few specific things like amniotic fluid volume, fetal movement, and a few other things. It was nice to see her again, even though she's so big that it was tough to distinguish body parts. The tech didn't really tell us anything. She did give us a few pictures, so here they are, but like I said she's so big that they don't look like much.

We grabbed some lunch before D-husband went back to work, and shortly after I got home I got a call from Dr. Arensdorf, our OB. She had already received the test results, and said everything looks "perfect". Woo hoo!! At our last appointment we had talked about inducing labor this Friday if I hadn't had the baby by then, but she said that unfortunately she has a meeting on Friday, so if we need to induce she would like to do it Thursday morning rather than wait until Monday. I told her I was a little confused about how to interpret the test results...I would have thought that if everything looked fine, we should wait longer. She said that's not necessarily always the case, and in any case she doesn't like to let anyone go past 41 weeks. I decided it would be fine to do it Thursday (she's the doc, after all, and I trust her), so she went ahead and put us on the schedule for Thursday morning!

Still hoping we won't get that far, of course... :)