Pregnant Updates

I woke up on Tuesday morning with incredible back pain. I was walking around like I had a stick up my butt. I have a bad lower back and I was afraid the added pregnancy weight and the changing center of gravity would really mess up my back. That’s why I was doing pilates up to 3 times a week, to keep my core muscles strong. While I wasn’t able to avoid back pain altogether, I have no doubt that pilates really helped me avoid it thus far.

My doctor checked me out and ruled out pre-term labor. I was pretty certain that it was back pain and not pre-term labor, but at the same time I hadn’t felt the baby move all morning and it was a little concerning. But we listened for the heartbeat and everything was fine. At 27.5 weeks, we would prefer it if the baby stayed inside to cook for another couple of months.

I went to Physical Therapy and it turns out the left side of my pelvis was rotated forward and causing all the strain in my lower back. The rotation was probably due to sleeping on it wrong and relaxed ligaments in my body (due to pregnancy). So the therapist massaged my back and gave me a few stretches to do. The next day my lower back was almost all better, but my mid-back was super sore from compensating for my lower back. I felt as if I did 1000 situps. After another PT session that included more massage, I am almost back to 100% today. Phew!

We took our first baby class yesterday. It was the infant and child CPR class. This is the class you hope to never have to use, but it’s good to know what to do in an emergency. Choking is a big concern, especially with small children. We have a bunch more classes this month – breastfeeding on Saturday and next week we start the labor class. The labor class is the one the doctor said we should really take (all others were optional), and it’s a 9 hour class over 3 days. I can’t imagine that we need that much time to discuss labor.

We are also trying to figure out if we want to bank the baby’s cord for potential future use. It sounds like a great idea in theory, but we are not convinced yet.

Pros:
Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to help your children?
There’s a 75% chance this baby’s cord could help other children we have, and a smaller but viable chance it could help us as parents and others in the family.

Cons:
The up front fee is over $2000 and the yearly fee is ~$125. Insurance will not cover any of it.
The probability that you will actually use it is small due to the limited number of standard procedures cord blood can be used for, but at the same time this is changing constantly with increased research.
It seems like a standard procedure might use up all the cord blood, thus making it only available for 1 treatment/person/etc.

The investment actually doesn’t sound that bad. But at the same time it could be ~$5000 for a 20 year investment for 1 child. The big question is, will we regret it if a situation arises and we don’t have cord blood available. Maybe. But you can’t prepare for everything, right? Even when you weigh the pros and cons of any situation and feel as if you made the right choice, sometimes the decision you make will still end up being the bad one. I expect this is the first of many hard decisions we will make as parents. It’s definitely a lot easier to make a decision for yourself, but when you have to make a decision that so directly affects another human being, it gets a lot tougher.

We’ll continue to do the research and probably ask new parents who were faced with the same question and see what they decided and why.