The Pregnancy...the first 25.5 weeks

Well, yep. I am pregnant. Most anyone who reads this knows that. We are having a little girl and she is due to appear June 1st. I'm thinking she'll come May 27th. John keeps saying riduculous things like June 12th or June 8th. No way. :)
Well once the morning (and afternoon and evening) sickness finally subsided I have been feeling pretty good. My energy is up a little more and my belly is growing every day. I feel her kick all the time and do sumersalts and she is sure stretching out my skin.
About a month ago we went in for my regular check-up and my blood pressure was just a little high so my doctor ordered a 24 hour urine collection. Let me tell you what a joy that was! I had to spend my whole day close to home and pee in this horribly designed "hat" and then keep it in a nice jug in the fridge. It was such a joy, let me tell you. So I drop it off Sunday morning at the lab and Monday while I am at work a nurse from my doctor's office (she works for a different doctor because my doctor is only there wednesday - friday) and this other doctor call and tell me my protien levels are really really high and I need to go home and be on bed rest until the next morning when can go to their office to see them. So of course we are so worried and stressed and thinking of a million things and start reading about preeclamsia and eclamsia and are feeling pretty miserable at this point. (Physically I feel pretty good though). So, we go in to the office the next morning and my blood pressure is the highest it's ever been (I say it's from all the dang stress! ) It was still not soooo high.. but too high for a pregnancy... and high enough that they send me over to Triage. So we spent the next 5 hours in this little room in triage and over there with their machine my blood pressure is normal, my urine is protien free and the three blood tests they did all came out normal. horray! Too bad it took all day for them to tell us that! So it turns out my protien level was 3870 mg (normal is 0, 300 is too high). Yikes! but now everyone is really confused that the blood tests were normal.. so they have me redo the dang 24 hour urine collection. so I had to take more time off work to essentially stay home and pee in a cup. Well, this time the protien level is 389 mg.. a LOT better but still a little high. jeesh. I'm still not exhibiting any of the pains or swelling that come a lot with preeclamsia so we are feeling a little better about things.. and of course after a lot of prayers from family and friends and fasting and priesthood blessings.. so we are feeling not soo stressed all the time anymore. Well my OBGYN then referred me to a Perinatal (high risk) doctor. We saw him on the 5th of February and we loved him. They did a long ultrasound and the baby is doing awesome. Whew.. So he's trying to figure out what the heck is going on (my blood pressure was great that day and had no protien in my urine). So he starts invesitgating my medical history a little. I don't really have much of a medical history.. but then it dawns on me that I have had something going on with my kidney's for a while.. i've never gone to the doctor for it but I know something is not right with my kidneys. My mom told me that when I was younger I had a lot of bladder infections and when I was in college I had a really bad one that gave me severe (can't move and sobbing) pain in my kidneys. Well I still never went to the doctor for that.. I just got a blessing from my friend and took two days of an antibiotic dose (I didn't know I was supposed to keep taking it) and then I was miraculously better. However, since then when I get UTI's they are so miserable and tenatious and take forever to go away as well as give me kidney pain. I even get kidney pain when I don't drink enough water.. well says Dr. Joffe "you may be chronically building up kidney stones, or you may have some disorder where your bladder regurgitates the urine back to your kidneys which will raise your blood pressure and cause the protien in your urine." Okay. so now i'm thinking I'll finally get this kidney stuff figured out! However he told me to start taking a baby asprin every day to help prevent preeclamsia and to take my blood pressure daily. He ordered about 6 tests at the lab, a kidney ultrasound and fasting renal (kidney) doppler (listened to the blood flow to and through my kidneys). I finished those tests about a week and a half ago and haven't heard anything which I am taking as good news. However I still had one last test to complete- I got to ruin another weekend by collecting my urine for 24 hours again. (at the least the "hat" design is getting better with each test!). Again I dropped the test off Sunday morning and gave them some blood, and again this other doctor's office gets is and calls me.. So I have to quickly cancel patients for the next afternoon so I can go back to the hospital, get more blood tests done (for preeclamsia), get my blood pressure checked and have a fetal monitoring ultrasound done. The baby is still doing great and my blood pressure is okay. jeesh! At this point I still haven't heard anything from the Perinatal Doctor and am just confused.. I have another fetal assesment ultrasound tomorrow morning and an appointment with the regular OBGYN. Hopefully all that will go well and I will know more about what the heck is going on. I still probably won't know everything until I meet with the Perinatal specialist on the 5th. Sigh. Other wise I feel okay. I do get dull pain in my right kidney... daily. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And the last few days my sciatic (psychotic) nerve is Killing me! Also I've been having bad sharp pains in one spot in my belly where it feels like my muscle is getting shredded apart. jeesh.. other than that, i'm good!
Tonight John talked to the baby for a few minutes in Spanish and told her he wants to feel her move and then sure enough he put his hand on my belly and felt her move a lot. :) This was teh first time he's felt her move. It was awesome. This pregnancy stuff is for the birds but we are so excited and anxious to be parents and can't wait to meet her. :)
Thanks everyone for your prayers and support!