Yes indeed folks, the C-Section date is set…….. although, in the words of the Doctor, we are merely “pencilled in” for the 16th January which isn’t quite as concrete like as you might hope but works for me for the time being!

So, yesterday’s appointment was a whole host of unnecessary palavers – I’m sure that the Doctor is a lovely person, but she proved to be completely unable to read patient notes and totally lacking in the tact department!

She started by trying to persuade me that I actually wanted to give birth naturally – given that right from the word go I have been totally upfront with everyone about my desire to have a 2nd c-section and have had nothing but reassurance that that would be fine from the medical persons I have spoken to up to this point, I was slightly surprised by this u-turn and also felt that this was something that should have been broached about 6 months ago and not when you only have 5 weeks remaining till your due date!

Having reluctantly “pencilled us in”, she then wanted to have a listen to Baby and have a good feel of my middle. This involved 5 minutes of trying to locate the heartbeat whilst muttering about it being “hard to find” and me getting slightly more panicked each time she moved the machine to a new location and still didn’t pick it up – what I hadn’t realised was that she hadn’t taken the time to read the midwifes notes from my Friday appointment that made reference to the fact that she felt that Baby was currently in a Breech position, and therefore she was trying to find it’s heartbeat in it’s bottom! Having poked at me a bit more she said “I think this Baby may be breech” and with that, located the heartbeat just under my ribs! Easy Peasy!

Another bout of poking and a whipping out of the tape measure revealed my oversized bump, another thing that had come to light at Friday’s appointment – having said that, the midwife’s measurements had me at 37 weeks instead of 34 and a half and the Doctor’s had me at 42! I can assure people that I had not eaten that much cake over the weekend and, if she had taken her note reading pills that morning, a little red warning flag would have been waving in her head and suggesting that she might want to re-measure me just to be on the safe side!??

As it stands, I now have to go and have a GTT (that being a Glucose Tolerance Test not a Gin and double Tonic!) on 2nd of January, her thought being that Baby’s large size is due to my having Gestational Diabetes regardless of the fact that I have NEVER displayed any symptoms nor has there ever been any Glucose in my urine samples in either of my pregnancies (and that includes that sample on Friday, Sunday and the one I did 10 minutes before seeing the Doctor on Monday!) followed by a scan on 3rd January to check whether we are still the wrong way up and to check kidney function – perhaps I should have mentioned at this point that my Grandma had 5 children, all naturally and the lightest was my Mum at 9 and 1/2lbs and the heaviest was my Uncle Ted who weighed a minimum of 14 lbs.…………that was as far as the scales went, so it was most likely more!

I’m sorry if all of that comes across as a bit of a rant, and it may well have been made worse by my being somewhat hyper sensitive at the moment, but I did come away in tears wondering what you have to do to get people to actually listen to what you are telling them……..or to at least read your notes before embarking on an examination!?

Asides from that, we haven’t been up to an awful lot recently. Isabel had her first immunisations this morning (delayed because of clashes with Cleft Palate surgery) which she wasn’t overly thrilled about but cheered up with the help of some stickers that the nurse gave her!

The end of the week will see us heading off on our Christmas Tour and then it will be back home to gear up for returns to work and the last bits of preparation before Baby makes his or her appearance a couple of weeks later!