Today we had Lime's 36 week growth scan. After four weeks of twice-weekly monitoring, this was the test that would really determine whether he was struggling in utero and would have to be delivered early. So, of course, I didn't sleep much last night. Papa Bear came with me to the appointment, and got to experience firsthand the joy that is the non-stress test. As usual, Lime sailed through, completing his required number of accelerations well before the 20 minutes were up. Then, it was off to ultrasound land. As you might imagine, I was really not happy to hear the ultrasound tech say "Oh, I'm new here, I don't know how to do the Dopplers so we'll have to have someone else come in to take care of that." In any event, she did eventually manage to take all the required measurements (with no help from Lime, who squirmed away at all the wrong times), and then had someone more experienced come in to do the Dopplers. We had been told last week that we would be meeting with the doctor today to discuss the outcome of the test, but of course they only had one doctor on duty this afternoon, and lots of patients who needed their results read, so they sent a nurse to talk to us instead.
The long and the short of it is that, after all these tests, all this monitoring, and all this anxiety, they have come to the remarkable conclusion that Lime is, well, smallish (yes, that's the technical term). He is sticking right on his growth curve and is now about 5lb 9oz--on track to be born at almost exactly the same size as his (also smallish) older brother. His heart rate, blood flow and amniotic fluid and all that continue to look perfectly normal. So, at least for now, induction is off the table, and as long as Lime continues to pass his non-stress tests and Dopplers each week, they are happy to just let the pregnancy run its natural course--which is all Lime and I ever wanted to begin with. Phew.
Lemon is continuing to focus on just being an almost-two-year-old. We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of his vest, which will replace the chest physical therapy that I'm still doing manually twice a day. Between my lap shrinking and Lemon growing, we're really running out of room to do it the way that we have been for the last two years. Our doctor prescribed the vest (we're getting this one) at our last clinic visit back at the end of May, with the idea of having it in place before Lime's arrival. But, it's a pretty pricey piece of equipment so it appears that the wheels of medical bureaucracy are turning even more slowly than usual. The week after it was prescribed, I got a call from the manufacturer about their estimate of what our out of pocket costs would be, based on our insurance. I told them the costs were fine, and they said in that case they would go ahead, and we should hear something in 10-15 business days. I somehow thought that meant that in 10-15 business days, they'd be calling us to figure out when to deliver the vest to us, and give us our in-home training on how to use it.We still hadn't heard anything as of this morning, so I gave them a call, and found out that they are still waiting for some medical records from our hospital, which they then pass on to the insurance company, and then the insurance company will determine whether they're covering the vest or not, and then once the insurance company has made up its mind, then we can talk about when we might actually receive the vest and get our training. So, not exactly where I was hoping the process would be at this stage, with my due date just over 3 weeks away. Oh, and of course, all of this is happening using good old fashioned paper and snail mail. Apparently, even though Madison is home to Epic, one of the biggest companies in the electronic medical records space, actually using the electronic version of those records is still a thing of the future. At this rate I'm not that optimistic that we'll
have the vest before Lime arrives, which is very frustrating because we've been talking to our clinic about making this happen for, oh, I don't know, 8 months? Maybe we have unrealistic East Coast expectations for how a process should run, but even by Midwest standards this seems a bit ridiculous!
