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I am pregnant.
Welcome to Hello Bump. We're making pregnancy less overwhelming and more manageable. I'm Grace Rubray, pregnant for the first time, and my clothes don't fit me anymore, some of them. And I'm on a Pittman.
I'm a former Olympian, mother of six little people, and I'm now training to be an obstetrician.
Each episode will be holding your hand week by week through the mysterious, perplexing, and sometimes expensive miracle that is pregnancy.
Week eighteen.
What fruit are we?
We are now a large orange. Apparently a naval orange from last week is smaller than a large orange, so we're moving on to a large orang. Okay, something that some people like in pregnancy are big.
Back yes, or a sunflower suflap that's much nice, that's beautiful.
Fourteen to fifteen centimeters so big getty, bigger, one hundred and forty to two hundred grams. So you know, we're starting to get a little bit more substantial in size.
And how are they developing this week.
They have eyebrows.
That's weird. I know, it's very cute. Hair and fingernails.
I just think that is so cute to think that that, you know, a little person in there is starting to get little tufts of hair above their eyes. They can now yawn and hiccup, but you probably won't feel the hiccupping. And they have taste buds, so they're starting to actually taste the amniotic fluid that they're drinking in. And then you know, depending on what you're eating, may actually start to like different things.
Oh, I feel bad for them.
Well, you're not eating very much.
I'm eating a lot of a lot of carbs. Like the safe foods are bread, pasta, burritos, britos.
You said you have some beef and.
I haven't kicked any. It's definitely more like a goodsman comes sautee vegetables. What's good. It's actually really good. There's heaps of stuff in it.
Absolutely great.
I hope they like Mexican food when they like spicy, come out. What's happening to me? And what is happening to our body right now?
Or your uterus is definitely pushing up more there's more arteries and blood flow, so you might feel it a little bit dizzy when you stand up occasionally, and you're probably starting to gain a bit more weight, and it'd be a bit more obvious to you on the scales.
I definitely felt getting more dizzy, and it was something that really made me feel quite anxious sometimes as well, Like I'd stand up and I'd feel dizzy, and then I would keep doing like the scan to go, am, I okay, it's.
Good, I'm sorry. That's great, because people just dismiss dizziness as oh, I'm just dizzy because I'm pregnant. So what else did you feel?
And my heart? That's when I could feel my heart either beating faster or I could just definitely, I think overall in pregnancy, and I think it's from the theme of every single week blood yep, more blood yeap is I could feel my heart beating in a way that I've never been able to feel it before. Like sometimes I can feel it like down in my stomach, or I could definitely feel it in my chest. My pulse is a lot longer.
That can be a little bit scary. I mean, I'm glad that you saw it as an issue most of the time. It's not. Most of the time. It is. As we said, it's blood volume and your heart is having to work harder to pump that blood volume around. So yes, most people do describe they can feel their heart beat, sometimes for the first time in their life, like, oh wow, that's strong. Sometimes it is faster. It can go up to ten to twenty beats faster in pregnancy.
So either our heartwork beats harder or it beats faster to help that circulation because your cardiac outputs increase significantly. I think it's time to discuss a few of the red flags in this space though, because yes, in most cases,
think about it. Your body is unfortunately prioritizing your baby over the rest of your body, and so when you're sitting down calmly, it's sending all your blood boats not all of it, but a large amount of your blood volume to your kidneys and to your uterus to support your baby. So your main organs to get prioritized over your legs and unfortunately upstairs. So when you stand up quickly, that bloodlog, oh my goodness hasn't quite caught up with
me yet. I'm prioritizing this little lady off it goes and then you feel a bit dizzy. It should right itself pretty quickly though, so it should redistribute fairly quickly. This is the time I think we need to raise a few red flags because not always. It's example, a higher faster heart rate and feeling is a sign of PE. So that's the pulmonary embolism that we talked about before. So if you're having persistent tachy cardia, which is a fast heart rate, any sign of chest pain, it's a
red flag. It's a straight to the emergency department if you're under twenty weeks, or to your birth unit because you need to rule that out it is life threatening. Pregnancy unveils stuff. So sometimes you might have a very healthy body, you've never been to the hospital in your life, but you don't know that you don't have an underlyzing cardiac disease. So there might be something with your valves. There might be something with the actual muscles around your heart.
Because you can get things like valvular disease and cardio Mapitthian pregnancy which unfortunately become unearthed, and so if you're having those symptoms, it's just better to get them ruled out, So the situation will simply be you'll go in that pop an ECG on you, like an older person having a heart check. They'll check if there's any obvious a rhythmias.
If there is, they might send you for some extra tests like an echo cardiac echo where they look at the valves and they look at the way the heart functions, or they might even put something on you like a whole to monitor, which actually tracks the way your heart works over twenty four hour hours. Now, many of the time won't capture what you're actually experiencing. Luck that you get dizzy in that first twenty four hours, so sometimes it could take a little bit of a work up here.
But I think the key is to get checked in and aware if there's anything major, because the last thing you need to be is a higher risk pregnancy and feel unwell, you know, when you want to just enjoy what you're going through.
One thing that my midwifes did check around this stage was my hemoglobin and my iron because they said, let's just make sure that you're pumping the right amount of oxygen around your body. Does that have some like can you explain how that has something to do with the dizziness or your heart changing.
Yeah, it also could be dehydrated guys. So if you've got low blood volume that day, you've just not drunk enough. Sometimes you can get dizzy from that. So what is hemoglobin, so hemoglobin or your HB. So when you're looking on your blood tests, you'll see the little mark saying hemoglobin is one hundred and thirty. So that's a good, nice level of hemoglobin. And so all that is the molecules that carry the oxygen around your body. In pregnancy, it's
the hemoglobin is made up of iron. So if your iron stores drop because your bubby is nicked at all, fortunately a little parasite, as we said, it's taken all your iron, your body can't rebuild that hemoglobin. And so throughout particularly labors, when we worry about obviously we worry about impregnancy if you're really tired and fatigue because of low iron and low hemoglobin. But in labor you are going to unfortunately bleed no matter what, because it's part
of the process of birthing. And so therefore, if you start off low, in other words, if your hemoglobin is under one hundred and ten and your iron level is for us. It's under thirty is the level, but some women coming with irons down at through Ferreton levels of three and five, like really low, it's time to start
an oral iron supplement. So signs to say yes if you've got a fast heart rate or you're feeling really dizzy, but particularly women describe feeling really tired, feeling back to like what they felt like in the early trimester, well in the first foun out they were pregnant. Get it checked even if you should have had it checked around sort of seven or eight weeks of pregnance, you're even
before pregnancy anyway. But if not, get it rechecked. And particularly if you've been someone who's unfortunately had what we call aphs, which is antipatum hemorrhages. So if you have been bleeding in pregnancy, we'll go to that all that's a big topic. But if you've if you have been one of those people that could drop quite quickly.
What are some things that we can do this week? What are some things to check off on the checklist that we can check off on the checklist.
Well, as I said, book your morphology. It's got to be done. But I'm going to go with a mothery one here. I think it's time to start capturing belly photos, you know, I think it's time to turn sideways in the mirror and take a picture because you're going to start seeing things change quite quickly now. And obviously keep adding to that playlist of music for your birth.
My talk kit is about not feeling movement yet, and I don't know if there's other people, depending on where their percenter is, that they're not going to be able
to film movement. And I know we'll talk more about placenta when we get to morphology, but I wanted to know some tips or some reassuring things from you if when people do start to feel movement and they get excited, but you're not still weeks away from that, what are some things that can reassure or I don't know, when is it most likely to start feeling this?
So frustrated?
Is it? Yeah?
The whole saying around a percenter being anterior or posterior. All that means is your placenta growing on the front of your uterus, on the back of it. If it's growing at the back, you'll feel your baby's movement more. If it's growing on the front, it can actually it just does it because Bobby's kicking against the placenter and she's not big enough yet to make forceful movements you can feel, and so it's very frustrating for those women.
And I have one practicey. I've had lots of them obviously, where I didn't feel baby moved till twenty seven, twenty eight weeks confidently like that was so scary and acually. I had ultrasound skills, so I was scaring myself every couple of days because I was so afraid i'd lost
the baby. But I think you just need to be reassured that the chances of something going wrong at this gestation is low, and if it's going to happen, as horrible as this sounds, there's nothing we can do about it at this point, so just relax, give it a couple more weeks. There'll be times coming up in the next few years where we hassle you, the doctors and the midwives, go is your baby moving, Grace, is it moving? Is it moving? You're like, oh, stop asking me, I'll
tell you if it's not right now. If you're not feeling it can be completely and utterly normal.
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This episode was produced by Courtney Ammenhauser with audio production by Tom Lyon.
We'll catch you next time.
Bye.
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