Minutes of my birthday

Many thanks for the birthday wishes for yesterday.

Overall I had a pretty good day.

It started badly at midnight as I missed Dad terribly. It's my first birthday without him and there's no card with his neat handwriting in it and no book ordered from my Amazon wishlist. And he died at 68 - so I am officially past half his age. I don't know why that mattered but it served to make me feel older.

So after a rather tired night, with the usual odd nightmares (I had those with V. too) I went to work in the morning and had my annual feedback session with my manager. He told me that he was going to request the top rating for me (subject to agreement from a team of other managers on the account I work on).

This session ran over a little and as a consequence I had to gob down my glucose rather quickly. Luckily I wasn't sick. Then I picked up DH (who had also taken the afternoon off for my appointment and my birthday) and we went to the OB's office.

Heartbeat was heard and Beanie was seen moving around. Once again I could see him waving on the screen but couldn't feel it. We saw his very clear little boy parts again. My cervix is "very long with absolutely no pressure". We discussed low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) shots for the 3rd trimester. My OB had already spoken to the haematologist to get her opinion.

I have a mild clotting disorder called Factor V Leiden - mild as I only have the hetereogenous version of it. This means I only have one gene with the disorder - homogenous FVL is a much more serious clotting disorder. It was only discovered that I had it in the battery of tests I had after V. died and after that both my brother and my mother discovered they had it too. My mother never lost any pregnancies and my grandmother had six children. My mother says my grandmother didn't lose any pregnancies either but I reckon she might have lost early pregnancies and not even known about it herself. But there's no evidence of that.

New statistics show no strong evidence that mid-late term obstetric problems are caused by heterogenous Factor V Leiden. It may cause early miscarriages. My D-dimers are checked regularly and I'm taking baby aspirin every day. LMWH has to be self-injected everyday, but is prophylactic not therapeutic. In short it wouldn't do any harm to me or Beanie to take them, but there's no real evidence that I need them either.

So we've decided that I'll keep taking the aspirin and keep having my D-dimer levels monitored and keep seeing the foetal medicine expert for blood flow scans in the placenta and the cord and only if a problem begins to show will I start doing the LMWH shots (when you start them, they have an immediate effect, unlike the thyroxine supplements I take which take several days to build up). It's not like I'm clamouring to start injecting myself everyday, although if I was told I had to for Beanie's sake, I wouldn't hesitate.

Then DH and I went out for a late lunch together and he bought me a new mobile phone for my birthday. He had also got my favourite handbag repaired. After walking around, my back was playing up again, so we came home and watched the last episodes of Season 3 Des.per.ate Hou.sew.ives on DVD and ate some of the little Sachertorte birthday cake he got for me - possibly my favourite cake ever.

So although I am now 35 years old (and sadly not 5 as my 3 year-old niece claimed over the phone) and don't like that at all, the day was pretty good.