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I am pregnant.
Welcome to Hello Bump.
We're making pregnancy less overwhelming and more manageable.
I'm Grace Rubray.
I'm pregnant for the first time, and all of a sudden, I love my feet being touched.
I'm out of Pittman.
I'm a former Olympian mother of six, an obstetric and guyiny registrar.
These days and.
Each episode, Leanna and I will be holding your hand week by week through the mysterious, perplexing and sometimes fatiguing miracle.
That is pregnancy.
Week fourteen.
What size is our baby?
Peach or nectarine?
We're still fruits and a large apricot.
Yeah, basically a stone fruit.
Yes, we're in the summer.
Exactly great.
And what have they developed?
The baby's face is now becoming more recognizable, so those eyes and your nose and ears and things are in the places you're sort of expecting to be. It is take a little bit longer, and the baby's reflexes are starting to work, so those movements again are becoming more rigid.
When does that.
What do they call it the scrunch?
Are they starting to do that?
Yeah, they're doing that. I mean they're still very rigid. There's not a lot of flexibility in them, but a little moved. I don't know when that full of the full stretching scrunch happens, like when it starts happening. It definitely happens from the third semester, but whether they're I mean they look at it on ultrasound like I've done ob with a lot of ultrasounds as well, and you still see that, but there's not real arching. You don't see the back arching as much yet.
What's happening to me.
And what's happening to our bodies?
Hopefully by the second trimester, you're definitely feeling more energetic and a little bit more active, not everyone. I know, your breast will definitely be starting to get bigger now, and yes, that bump will be slowly getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It happens quicker now, like you're starting to look pregnant.
Is there too many cup sizes to go up when you start to get bigger? Because myself and a few other pregnant women in the office, they said they've gone up like.
Two or three cup sizes.
Like there's definitely a noticeable difference from the changes in to your breast in the first trimester.
You're getting getting.
More more fat flying down your the actual ducts of the of the breast is starting to form in a more effective way for ready for breast milk. But I think one reassuring thing is if you haven't noticed it, some women don't get any breast enlargement or any engorgement at all. You can steal breastfeeds, so the size of your breast is actually not going to correlate with whether you're actually able to feed. Lots of very small breasted women. I was one of those.
Before I had breasting plants that were able to feed.
You're not going to know how you can feed literally until the baby comes out.
It's not a clue. It's like a test you can't study for. It is a test you can't study for. And I think it's something if it's something that's really important to you, and it was really important to me. And look, I struggled really badly with breastfeeding, but not yet. But in the next couple of weeks, starting to look at a the lactation consultant. Now it sounds well, hang
on a second, I'm not lactating, I'm pregnant. No, it's to start lurking out what's important to you and what you can do to help potentially get breastfeeding to work or the opposite, if you decided it is absolutely not for you, Like you know, I have implants. I decided to feed with my implants. Some women who had breast augmentation to decide it's definitely not for them. What you can do to manage symptoms like mastatis and turning that milk supply off.
Is this normal?
Is normal?
Is this normal for this week? Is one?
Why does messaging feet feeling credit for two? I am still vomiting, which is sad. But one point that I did want to bring up from when I got my NAPT results was the scenographer looked at my results when we said this is lower risk, this is low risk, and said huh. And she turned to me and said, are you vomiting? And I said yes, she has no wonder. Your hCG is three times higher what we'd normally see.
When does that start? When does that in theory start to drop? Or should it have happened.
Well, the bad HAASEG levels peak around sort of the nine to eleven week mark and then should start dropping back down again, so you can get like the hundreds
of thousands, so yours must have astronomically high. Well it seems like that in all things, but we don't fully understand hypremisis I think we sort of talked to that a bit about before or vomiting and nausea in pregnancy, but we do know that the meat HG contributes, So there is definitely a don't know evidence to say that higher levels of beta hahg are going to contribute to it,
which just makes sense, doesn't it. Like, if you think about it, you weren't pregnant, you had no nausea, We throw these hormones in the mix, and you're terribly sick. So I think unfortunately for you it is. It's definitely something we notice with women who have HG that their heat BETAHG levels.
Are very high. So I'm sorry.
Hopefully it starts, but then again it doesn't. It doesn't explain it completely, does it. Because some people have normal levels of beta hahg for that gestation as they approach twenty weeks and they're still terribly nauseous and sick, so it's got to be a factor.
And then secondly, why why feet massage is so good now all of a sudden we didn't like them before? Though I was ambivalent, I was agnostic to anostic.
I have always been even after retirement from sport. I am still a foot massage first. So feet carrying a little bit extra weight carry comement. It's not just the baby weight, which isn't much yet, but it's the blood volume as well, so there's there's still.
Quite a lot going on.
And you know, you're still active and walking around in the day, the muscles and the progester and everything relaxing, everything, all the joints in your feet gets sore, and you even go up a size in your in your feet. Lots of women just grow bigger feet. Yes, and again it's not actually that you've grown bigger. It's just that all those bones and muscles have relaxed more, and so it can appear like your arch drops and everything and appear like you've got you know, your your shoes feel tight.
And is that your feet changing? Shame the pregnancy nose? Is that real?
I don't know, and I have tried to look that up because I've had at least three patients asked me does my nose? And even sat on Instagram last week there was a woman that put a photo of herself with prepregnancy nose and her post baby nose. It looked bigger in the pictures. But I guess there's lots of growth factors running around, you know.
But it's blood volume.
Blood volume. I don't know that one.
I think will leave to the more qualified professionals.
But what can we do this week?
So this is the week that if you have any high risk factors for diabetes, it's time to start planning in your early OGTT.
So that is the tests.
Guys, you haven't had one before where you drink a horrible eighty grams of glucose.
It's thick and yucky. I've done it several times. Really not if I have.
To lose to not do anything in pregnancy that would
be it. I hate the glucose tolerance. Then they take a blood test, so at the time when you've given it, and then one hour and two hours afterwards to check, so look at you're fasting, and then they look at your one hour and two our otherwise, how has your body processed the glucose, what is your insulin and things like where is your body at when it comes to the big dose of sugar, because when you're pregnant, you become more prone to diabetes, so you've got more glucose
running around and you have less from memory, it's something to do with your insulin that basically reduces the amount that your body takes up to allow it to circulate to your fetus, because you want to make sure that there's enough circulating nutrition for your baby.
So that is important to check because.
This is where big babies can come, This is where little babies can come. This is where undiagnosed diabetes that you might have that's actually pregestational. In other words, you might actually have underlying diabetes before pregnancy might raise its head. And we actually know that uncontrolled diabetes could I'm sorry to bring it up because it's quite a tax challenge. You wanted to say, it could even lead to stillbirth.
So it's really important to know the flip side of that, because you know you and I talked about we're always going to be honest, is that some doctors don't believe in it. So it's really hard because you might have one obstitution who says, I think you should have an early gestational test, and another one goes, that's bollocks. The research says it doesn't it doesn't do anything, and we're just medicating and putting these poor men on these horrible diets for no reason.
So well, my question is there's a lot of commentary online about it being the level that says you have gestational diabetes not being consistent worldwide.
It's not consistible Hospital White Grace.
That's why wild it's hard, and I think you need to just sort of work out what we call your local operating practices those what does your hospital recommend? What are the only things you can do? Eat well, go for your walk, listen to the team that's around You know that if you're trying to do all the right
things that it's going to be okay. You know, lots of people get diabetes in pregnancy, and the good thing about is if you do the positive if you do get it, it's actually a good thing to know because women who have gestational diabetes actually have a higher risk of type two diabetes in life. So it's kind of almost like a little hallow warning sign to say, hey, you're a little bit at risk, but if you change some of the lifestyle things you do now, you might
not be. And so I don't know the positive.
Is there a chance that if you do get gestational diabetes that it won't go away once the baby is born and then it does become that type two diabetes.
Absolutely, But from my experience, and I am really lucky that I actually work at a hospital that has obstetric physicians, so we kind of look after the pregnancy in the birth side of the preflamsy, but they also do the physician side of it, so if you're a worried or concern that your levels are astronomically high, you can actually
see them privately. So they're called obstetric physician, and they specialize purely in the medicine of pregnancy, so they look at diabetes, they look at high blood pressure, thyroid disease, and if phosphilipid syndromes or all the things that may potentially cause problems in your pregnancy. They're also the ones that we probably should have said this earlier in our podcast, if you're on medications, they're the ones that can help
you reconciliate those. In other words, if there's some say, for example, you have seizures or epilepsy, some of those medications are not necessarily good to have in pregnancy. So it depends what you're on, and they can help you rationalize which ones you should stay on. One thing we should say straight away antidepressants really common in pregnancy, really important you stay on them. Sometimes they might change the one you're on, but this is definitely not the time
to go playing with your antidepressant medications. But those I call them the gurus of pregnancy. These physicians I work with three or four of them who are literally the brightest people on the planet. Like they are phenomenal doctors that specialize in this space. And they're the ones that can sort of discuss, you know, diabetes and whether you are at a higher risk of having it post baby. You are certainly at a higher risk of it in your sex subsequent pregnancies.
In my talk It this week, I have a product for massaging feet and it is the Brillow Beauty Magnesium Spray. There's this is some created by two women, Lee Campbell and Teaking the Tolley, and it's a pregnancy specific products of a balm and oil for your put on your belly, to put on your tummy, to help with potential stretch marks. So they have this magnesium spray and my partners is it to massage my feet?
That's my talkkit.
I mean, I've just got to get like cramps that things in pregnancy too. I've got Robert Hamilton as a friend, as a friend colleague of mine. Is an obstitution. It makes a belly barm as well. There's lots of good ones out there, But I quite like the idea of the magnesium because you know, that is definitely something I.
Had was terrible, terrible leg cramps.
Yes in the night, that's always.
Yes, you just stretch out and then suddenly your carf just goes fresh.
Yeah.
I know it's not pleasant.
No, it's not pleasant.
So and it is usually they don't fully know what it is, but it's often nutritional deficiency. So just keeping your water dehydrations your main cause of it, okay, and especially people like yourself who are still biting ignauseous impregnancy is very.
Hard to keep up that. You know, two to three letters of fluid today.
To do barockers and hydrolytes help.
I think so definitely.
If you're finding a struggle to get the electrolytes in, it's certainly not gonna hurt you're pee out what you don't use.
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This episode was produced by Courtney Ammenhauser with audio production by Tom Lyon.
We'll catch you next time. Bye.
This episode of Hello Bump was made in partnership with Huggis