Week 5 of Pregnancy (Trimester 1 of Preganancy)

So, there I was. Husband away, wondering if that bleeding last week was not an erratic menstrual blip, but implantation bleeding. Actually, it drove me crazy – so on Tuesday I bought a Clearblue Pregnancy Test, ready to use first thing Wednesday morning.

Well, it is supposed to take 1 minute for the vertical line to appear that confirms the test has been done correctly, and the result is ready to read. Within 10 seconds I could already see a faint horizontal blue line that got darker and darker - definitely pregnant!

How excited???? It was just killing me that AJ was away! I wanted him to be the first to know, but at the same time didn’t want to tell him until he came back from his trip. What a hard task I set myself – so I settled for doing lots of reading up on what was going on inside me. Out came the books from when I was pregnant with Rosie, some from the library and magazines from the newsagent (see bibliography).

I made an appointment that morning at the doctor’s surgery to register myself as pregnant. She asked for the date of my last menstrual period, told me my estimated due date (EDD) and asked where I wanted to have the baby delivered. If I hadn’t told her this was my first pregnancy, would she have asked? She certainly didn’t ask if it was uneventful, or what kind of labour I had. But she said she would get me into the ‘system’, and that I would hear from the hospital and the mid-wife soon. The Doctor calculated my EDD based on the first day of my last menstrual period (LMP) using the following formula: LMP + nine months + seven days. She came up with 18 May 2004.

I know that my ovum was fertilized about 3 weeks ago – but medically all pregnancies are dated from the first day of the last period, not from conception. So, what is called 5 weeks pregnant is actually about 3 weeks after conception. I calculate my estimated date of delivery (EDD) as 25 May 2004, based on date of conception + two weeks. According to my calculations, I am now nearing the end of the first month of pregnancy.

However, I am only giving this date to a select few – I don’t want a repeat of what happened around Rosie’s EDD. I must have had phone calls every day for the weeks leading up to and after her EDD, asking if anything had happened yet – it got me so wound up and pressurized, I swear that all the stress held that baby in for longer than she should have been!!

And now to make sure I look after my body, as it is housing my developing baby. I don’t smoke or drink alcohol, am a vegetarian on a relatively low-fat high-fibre diet, so that’s diet taken of care of more or less. But I still need to make sure I am getting enough protein and calcium, as well as the usual balance of vitamins and minerals. Avoiding soft cheese, raw eggs and liver should reduce risk of infections that can cross the placenta to the baby.

We have a garden which is basically a cat-toilet. We don’t have any cats, but there are plenty in the neighbourhood who appreciate soft, turned over soil in open flowerbeds. So for a while, gardening is a no-no too. I know that wearing rubber gloves and meticulous hand-washing can help avoid contracting Toxoplasmosis, but I am just not prepared to take the risk. Toxoplasma is a parasite that lives in cat-poo and infects the soil – when it finds a pregnant human host, it can cause damage to the baby’s brain and eyes. So if you are reading this and have a paved garden – please leave a litter tray outside for your moggy and help protect unborn babies!

It was quite convenient that I was using the ovulation predictors, and noticed the breakthrough bleeding. For most women it is only now in the fifth week that they realize they have missed a period and may be pregnant. By this stage the embryo’s nervous system is beginning to develop – a groove forms in the top layer of cells, which fold up and round to make the hollow neural tube. This will become the baby’s brain and spinal cord. As well as this, the embryo already has some of its own blood vessels, and the heart is forming.