First midwife appointment

Today was our first official prenatal visit with the midwife, Jo. 

We scheduled our visit first thing in the morning so as to (hopefully) avoid any of our clients seeing me.

I had already done my bloodwork the week prior, which was all back for Jo to review. My Panorama test is still pending though, which is nerve wracking. I found out yesterday that the lab hadn’t even started to process my results yet, and that made me go crazy. I basically called the lab, talked to whoever I could and even reached out to the lab rep, about it. It’s still pending without a result date. I completely understand the feelings people have about this test now (and we aren’t even finding out the sex).
Midwife note: Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) or cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) is a test done as early as 9-10 weeks. This test screens for Trisomy 21 (Down's syndrome), Trisomy 18 and a few other chromosomal abnormalities. This test is quite accurate as a screening (NOT diagnostic as it doesn't test for everything), with 98-99% accuracy. Many people like it because you can also find out the sex of the baby.
This test is relatively new (within the last 5-10 years) and was originally offered to only to high risk women (those over 35, family history of abnormalities, etc). Now it's becoming more of the standard of care. It is similar to the sequential screen, which tests for abnormalities and is also not as accurate. In our practice, we pretty much offer this test to everyone. 

Our visit was a pretty standard first prenatal visit. We talked about my medical history, medications/supplements and what to expect for the pregnancy. Jo catered a lot of the visit toward Fred and focused on what he didn’t know.

We then attempted to listen to the heartbeat. Since we were able to hear it already last week at home, I felt confident we would find it. It sounded normal.

We did see one of my clients on the way out. I had attempted to have Fred leave first, but it was probably kind of obvious what was going on. Luckily, our clients probably won’t ask questions.