34 Weeks – Relief

THE BABY TURNED!!!

Well, more accurately, I went in for a baby positioning check on Monday and we tried to turn the baby again. This time instead of pushing her head to my right, Denise pushed it to my left, and I guess once we got the baby sideways/transverse, she slipped right into vertex position.

We confirmed it with a quick ultrasound and I was sent home with their extra doppler to check heart tones periodically. They got up to the 160s when we were pushing her around but they dropped back down to the 140s before I left the appointment, so that was a great sign. Basically, you don’t want to see “decels” – decelerations – in the heart rate and we didn’t see any at all. Baby seemed to tolerate the ECV really well.

That description makes it sound a lot less uncomfortable than it actually was – parts of it were definitely painful and it kind of felt like all my internal organs were being rearranged, but it truly was a small price to pay for a vertex baby. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Baby movement feels really different now – before there was just a big round head up top, and now it’s all knees and feet and buns and the baby kind of feels like a squid.

I’m a little nervous that she’ll get a wild hair and decide to turn again before she’s born, but I’m doing what I can to get her head engaged in my pelvis and I think now that she’s head-down she’ll probably stay that way. (I hope.)

This breech thing has felt like a huge anvil hanging over my head for weeks. Once I realized that turning the baby was successful, I was so relieved I can’t even tell you. I’m so much less stressed out, and I feel like I’m able to continue planning for and visualizing my ideal birth as opposed to being torn between futilely hoping for a VBAC but trying to plan for a c-section.

Also, I joined the VBAC Facts Community on Facebook, which is a private group full of supportive people, lots of knowledge, and great birth stories. It’s improved my FB experience exponentially – there’s always something great coming up about VBACs on my feed!

File Under: Pregnancy, VBAC

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