I sure hope that gestating counts as (re)productive, because otherwise this has been my least productive week in years.
My primary experience is fatigue. I sleep 10 hours at night and on good days I get a two-plus-hour nap. You would think that leaves lots of time to run errands and Get Things Done, but somehow I’m not managing any of that. Forget running around; my biggest outings have been driving to the clinic for tests, and walking 2-4 blocks to go eat lunch with Bill at La Mexicana or Aladdin.
What’s most disruptive is the frequency and ferociousness with which these tiny beings demand to be fed. I wake up, feeling an unsettling combination of ravenous and nauseous. My Super Sweetie of a husband slips me a bowl of fresh pineapple chunks as he fires up the stove to scramble a couple eggs and grill a slice of Canadian bacon to go on a whole wheat English muffin.
Please note, this is a man who historically has fed himself cereal rather than a hot breakfast because it’s easier. He’s truly going all out for us, and I’m entirely grateful.
After I’ve polished off the Egg (Mc)Muffin, I’m less hungry and still tired. If I’m feeling ambitious, I head to my desk to try to do a little work, but actually just browse the interwebs. If not, I go lie down to read on the sofa. Either way, it isn’t more than 60-90 minutes before they insist, “FEED ME!” again.
Another aside: my hat is off to you gals who have held full-time jobs or tackled organic chemistry while pregnant. You have both my sympathy and my admiration. Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t think I could do it.
Judging by today’s ultrasound results, our embryos are putting all that food to good use, tripling in size in the last 8 days. “Audrey A” is now approximately 10.6 mm long and “Audrey B” is up to approximately 10.0 mm (1 cm). I asked whether the difference is size is meaningful and Dr. M assured us that it’s probably measurement error. Both have good strong heart rates, at 156 and 139 bpm respectively.
In case you aren’t in to musical theater… no, we don’t know their genders yet, and no, we haven’t discussed naming either of them Audrey. It’s a reference to Little Shop of Horrors, which stars a voracious people-eating plant. Sound familiar?
So our little embryos are 37 days old and growing like crazy. Our next check up is in two weeks. Only ~230 more days to go!
p.s. If you’re interested, you can watch and listen as Dr. M narrates our ultrasound from this morning, including both embryos’ heartbeats:
Dr. M described this simultaneous view of both our embryos as “owl eyes”
For reference, also via the UNSW Embryology site, here’s an amazing photograph of a comparably-aged human embryo (click for larger):
Photo of a ~5-week-old human embryo
Here’s what the photographer, Houston pathologist Ed Uthman, said about this photo:
“This photo of an opened oviduct with an ectopic pregnancy features a spectacularly well preserved 10-millimeter embryo. It is uncommon to see any embryo at all in an ectopic, and for one to be this well preserved (and undisturbed by the prosector’s knife) is quite unusual.
Even an embryo this tiny shows very distinct anatomic features, including tail, limb buds, heart (which actually protrudes from the chest), eye cups, cornea/lens, brain, and prominent segmentation into somites. The gestational sac is surrounded by a myriad of chorionic villi resembling elongate party balloons. This embryo is about five weeks old (or seven weeks in the biologically misleading but eminently practical dating system used in obstetrics).
The photo was taken on Kodak Elite 200 slide film, with a Minolta X-370 camera and 100mm f/4 Rokkor bellows lens at near-full extension. The formalin-fixed specimen was immersed in tapwater and pinned to a tray lined with black velvet. The exposure was 1/4 second at f/8.”
