Thursday, July 3, 2008

29w4d

This post is truly boring. Don't say you weren't warned.

I had my 29/30 week appointment yesterday. It was relatively uneventful. I had gained four pounds in twelve days and freaked out a bit, but the midwife told me that my swollen feet/ankles and puffy looking face suggested to her that it was more water than anything else. Her guess was 3.5 pounds of water and .5 of weight. She then gave me suggestions to reduce the swelling, but I'm not sure how much they'll help, since I already drink 1 - 1.5 gallons of water a day and can't really keep my feet up at work (which would only help with the feet/ankles anyway). I think the real key would have been not having Thai for dinner the night before (mmm... Drunken Noodles and Udon Basil Chicken). And cutting back on sodium generally, but she wants me to keep consuming the sodium to keep my blood pressure up. So I may just have to live with retaining a lot of water.

She also thought my neck looked swollen and sent me for bloodwork to check my thyroid levels. (I am sure they will come back normal -- medical people constantly think my neck looks swollen and send me for a thyroid check, and it always comes back normal. Apparently, I just have a thick neck.) And she figured if I was having a blood draw anyway, she'd check on my gallbladder as well (and seems to have added a liver test in as well, since I got the results of that and the gallbladder this morning -- both normal; no results on the thyroid yet).

That's about all that going on around here.

6 comments:

maresi said...

I'm sorry you're having that swelling... feel better soon.

Nicky said...

I'm no medical expert, and I was extremely skeptical when I got this advice from my doctor, so do with this what you like. I have also had increasing problems with swelling, despite drinking water all day long. My doctor told me that, once you're swollen, drinking water all day should keep it from getting any worse, but will take a very very long time to actually make it better. He said that if you want to fix the problem more immediately, it matters WHEN you drink the water. Something about a switch in your body that says "conserve water", and the need to really shock that switch into, um, switching.

The solution: drink a whole lot of water as fast as you can, twice in one day. I downed a quart of water in ~10 minutes, waited a few hours, then did it again. It made me feel a little ill (I'm not a "chugging" kind of person) but low and behold, the swelling was entirely gone by the next morning.

Unknown said...

Don't worry about the weight gain at all - it definitely sounds like water retention to me. It's unavoidable for the most part.

Cutting back on sodium is a hard pill to swallow. I don't know about you, but I've been craving salty foods thoughout my entire pregnancy (but no sweets, go figure). It's so hard to cut back!

I hope your blood tests come out normal. Keep us posted!

HereWeGoAJen said...

Now I want Thai food immediately. Oh, that sounds so good.

I hope the swelling goes away!

docgrumbles said...

I'll take boring over bad news any day!

Good luck with the swelling!

Lisa said...

Sorry about the swelling - I know how awful it can be. I don't want to give up my salty food either - it's too yummy and all I crave.
This appointment I gained 7 pounds in about 3 weeks! But I no longer have ankles either.
Isn't it crazy to see just about 60 days left?!?!