Hello BumpWelcome to Hello Bump, a podcast about what you’re not expecting when you’re expecting.
In this episode, hosts Jana Pittman and Grace Rouvray reveal your baby is around the size of a double Malteser, or a piece of sushi! At week nine, your baby’s muscles are starting to develop, and it looks like it’s cuddling itself. Jana fills you in on what your food cravings might mean and why food might not taste the same. Plus, Jana explains the screening tests you can now book in and how to decide if you want to get them.
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CREDITS:
Hosts: Jana Pittman and Grace Rouvray
Executive Producer: Courtney Ammenhauser
Audio Production: Thom Lion
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I am pregnanty.
Welcome to Hello Bump. We're making pregnancy less overwhelming and hopefully more manageable. I'm Grace Ruefrey. I am pregnant for the first time, and I now carry snacks in every bag that I own.
I'm Jana Pittman. I'm a former Olympian and now training obstetrician and birth six babies myself. That's a lot of babies, a lot of burgers.
Each episode, Yana and I will be holding your hand week by week through the mysterious, perplexing and sometimes very hungry miracle that is pregnancy. Week nine. What size is the baby?
Well, it's now like a double malteezer, like you know those ones that are stuck together and you can kindt of get really excited when they're a packet that looks a bit like that too.
I have. It could be a piece of sushi which I robicily I can't eat, this.
Is true, or a large jelly bean, but it's twenty millimeters or twenty five millimeters or over two centimeters now.
And what's happening? What are they grown?
Well, babies muscles are starting to develop, which I think is very cute. It's its arms and legs are now bed, so it looks like it's cuddling itself, and they have fingers and toes that are starting to form. They still webbed, so if you think about these sort of fishy, you still bit dinosaur like at this point. And its skin's there starting to develop, so it's very thin layers. You obviously have lots of layers of skin, and it's very transparent at this.
Point, and red quite red like it hasn't got the Yeah, exactly, Yeah colors. Is that the same for like every ethnicity as well, Like there's going to be.
It's can't tell you red at this point. I mean, I unfortunately have seen a few little ones that have come at this point and they just look all very similar. So, yeah, the melanin hasn't kicked in from a pigmentation perspective in the eyes or the skin for until much later in pregnancy.
What's happening to me now in terms of what's happening to our bodies? I do have a question straight off the bat, the weird taste in my mouth.
Oh, isn't it? And it's quite metallic. Yeah, that is what most women describe it.
I didn't get it.
What is it like? What is it?
It's like a combination of dry mouth, but then a weird taste like food just doesn't taste the same anymore. Which again, I'm further along than nine weeks that hasn't gone away. And a friend of mine actually said, the first meal you have once the placenta is removed from your body doesn't matter. If it's like the cafeteria sandwich at the hospital, it'll be the nicest tasting food in the entire world.
She's one hundred percent correct, because I can confirm that after all of my the cheese toasted the midwife brings are the bomb. She's in ham actually even better, it's so good. So your changes in your taste buds largely come about from estrogen. So again, those pregnancy hormones playing havoc, they often mask some of the more so your normal you know, mask some of the yucky flavors, and in pregnancy they just become more enhanced. I think the science behind it is that you're trying to avoid taking things that you shouldn't, so I guess it's a way it's your own body's surveillance system not to be consuming something that might hurt the baby. It's also a sign of potential nutritional deficiency, so it might be to just check your vitamin D and your vitamin and your eyen elevated enough, and you might even notice it coincides with some of the odd more odd cravings like cabbage or spinach or asparagus, which often indicates a follow that deficiency, So check it out. The other begone in guys is dental health, and I want to talk about this in more depth than another episode because it actually warrants it. But there might be a cavity developing there. So think about all the vomiting and all the acid and everything that's happening around. Now, yeah, it might be that you're actually tasting something yucky that's actually happening to your teeth.
And in terms of the vomiting and getting a cavity, one piece of advice that I got was, if you are vomiting a lot, don't brush your teeth every single time afterwards, because you could be stripping more of the enamel away. But to just wash your mouth out with water after you're vomiting each time.
Very good idea. And then and obviously book to see a dentists.
Yeah, to see a dentists. One of the foods that weirdly that I crave is everything. And I don't know if this is because of the weird taste in the mouth that you're talking about. Is everything else to be really cooked almost to the point of being burnt.
Really, yeah, jarcoal sort of sud I don't really or each to look it up and see if someone can let us know what type of diffish and see that there's got to be something to.
That, yeah, Or maybe it's more the mouth feel consistency.
Like okay, it's not I mean it's good to cook your meat through. I think that's one of the things. You know, there's always questions about what can I and can I not eat in pregnancy and what are the rules, and like, yes, guys, there's guidelines of you know, no raw fish and cheeses are off, and you know, eggs that are cooked have to be cooked through. But maybe that's particularly one of those things. Maybe your body's just actually craving that interesting.
And I've spent twelve years as a vegetarian and then pescatarian. And this because I started to feel tired. I've eaten meat.
They go, isn't that interesting?
Yeah?
God, he craved it.
Yeah, beefpeak of that episode in Friends. Or it's just like, that's what the baby wants.
It's not you.
You can blame the baby. Go back now to to you.
It depends how you feel environmentally about it too. I'm not a vegetarian. I've flirted with the idea over the years. Fortunately, I just like my meat.
But it's just it's the quickest source of protein, and I find that if I don't have protein in each meal, well I'm trying as hard as I can, and that's when I get more or sick because my stomach isn't full enough for long. It's just burnt through it too quickly. So it's trying to find whatever source of protein, which I can talk about later what I did.
Once you're able to eat more again, yeah, yeah, And pregnant is the time to give yourself a break in that space you even think about. You know, certain religions that DoD lent, for example, and often Ramadan, and often they're actually allowed to excuse themselves during pregnancy because we know the body demands certain things and it's a little bit more difficult to you know, go without food all day when you're trying to grow grow a small human.
And what can we do week nine? What are the things that we should be doing.
Well week nine? I think it's quite exciting, is if you're planning to do so we have to do screening. Well, no, that's not true. We don't have to. In fact, in pregnancy, you don't have to do anything. It's your body, your baby, and your decisions around things. But we recommend that you start thinking about doing some early tremesta, so your first tremester screening, so it is the earliest time we can see how this little baby's going in terms of its health. Doesn't have any chromosomal abtormalities, Are there any structural things that we need to let's be honest, make decisions about. And so the NIPT is one of the tests, and the combined try to screening first times screen is the other test. One of them's government funder, the other one, unfortunately, is out of pocket. Nine weeks is the earliest you can have an NIPT test, So that's your noninvasive prenatal testing. It's a blood test, guys, there's nothing more than that. It's just literally prick in the arm. And then they look at certain disabilities like Down syndrome and then PETAO and Edward syndrome, which is basically genetic conditions that you may or may not decide to continue with your pregnancy. Fairly accurate, but again, screening tool not diagnostic. It's a screening tool that gives you a risk ratio of how likely you are to have one of these conditions. The combined message first timesI screen is an ultrasound and a blood test that it actually looks at the nucle thickness of the back of the baby's neck, and we know that a thickened nucle so a thickened portion at the back of the baby's neck has a higher risk of chromosome will abnormalities. There's lots of other soft signs like absent nasal bones and problems with the heart that they can see very early. But the sum of all of that is there two tests that allow us to basically say, are you at risk of a baby with a disability? And so the question is would you do anything about it? Because if you aren't going to do anything about it, then you know, we're less worried about you doing it. Whereas if it's a discussion you had with your family that you would not continue with the pregnancy, then it's essential you have this done before thirteen and a half weeks of pregnancy because.
There is that window to have the test. And is that because there's a certain point something closes over and they can't test any further. What's the reason that you have to do it in that window?
The NIPT has to be before, sorry, after nine weeks because it's actually would you believe your baby's DNA so fractions of your baby's DNA circulating in the maternal blood, So you need there to be enough fractions or enough and enough of the DNA circulating that they can pick it up accurately. So the negative if you do it at sort of nine weeks and one days, that they send it back and it's not accurate, you need to repeat it. The combined first tremester screen needs to be between eleven weeks and thirteen weeks and six days. The benefit of that blood test is also that it also checks for things like your pre eclampsier risk and your interuterine growth restriction risk. Now that's a bit of a wooh. How do you do that from a blood test? It's a combined algorithm that basically looks at your age, looks at the size of the nukele thickness, some other soft factors on ultrasound, combined with your beta HACG levels, your papa A levels, all extra medical terms I know again, but basically, some very smart people in a laboratory and your sonographer combine all that information and pop out a risk to say, are you at risk of having high blood pressure and problems in your pregnancy? Is your baby going to be small? And does your baby have a disability that then you need to consider discussions about. And so that's when you'll be offered by your doctor a more diagnostic test like an amniocentesis to decide if there really is something wrong with your baby.
Do you know the ratio of women who aren't declining those tests? And it's absolutely each to their own. Everyone can make their own decisions, but in twenty twenty five is a lot of people wanting to know that information.
I've rarely had someone say no, they may not decide to pay the four hundred and ninety dollars to do their IPT. They might be like, you know what, I'm happy just to have the combined first trimester screen. Now that NIPT is more sensitive, but only for things like down syndrome. It is not an ultrasound. So what we strongly recommend is if you decide to do that, because it tells you the gender as well. And there's some people actually that's a funny one. People are actually choosing not to find out more. It's a total change in that space. But NIPT is the earliest you can find out because they can look at whether it's an XY or AX. You don't have to, of course, but they're only specific for those things. So you've got to remember that even if you had an NIPT, I would still recommend getting an ultrasound because it misses things like trip loidy. Now, I have a very close friend who had this happen. So she had a normal NIPT, completely low risk pregnancy, got to fourteen weeks and had an ultra sunk. She had some spotting, and the baby was found to be morbidly disabled and so not sustainable with life after birth, and so she had to make a very difficult decision to end her pregnancy, but you don't get that alone from the NIPT. It's not diagnostic. It cannot give you all the answers. There's also an extended screen NIPT now which basically looks for a whole lot of chromosome alumn nomalodies. Kind of sounds exciting and cool. There's also a lot of positive tests that are coming back that are false positives. And then it puts you down the pathway of if you have to have a good discussion with your obstecution or you're guiding at that point to decide, well, the risk of an amnios and tesis is miscarriage in one of two hundred risk of a miscarriage is that too much?
And amosentsis I only know this because of Gray's anatomy. Yeah, that's where the needle goes into your uterus from like through your stomach. Ye, And those are invasive screenings.
Faces screen. That and the CVS, which is basically the two tests that we look at to look for disability because they take actual cells, one from the ambniotic fluid and one from the placental mass.
I do have questions on that, but I might talk about that in week twelve when I actually did elect to do NIPT and booked it in so I do have some questions on the data that comes back, but we'll get to that in a couple of weeks. Time talk it. This week, mine is just snack related. It's getting like I mentioned before, Twisti's but I just getting like little snack snackable packets of tiny little things and just having them and also having even though it's going to maybe feel hard depending on what your aversions are. Almonds were really good because they are a small source of protein to hopefully make you if your nausea is tied to hunger, that might push you out a little bit longer in terms of when you need to eat that next meal.
And that's perfect. I think having lots of them in your bag too, because you might decide one over the other.
You might just hate one one day. I hate so many snacks at one point, I don't know, I'm.
Like, that's snacks.
I really went back to childhood, like basic, Oh that's gold.
Buy an ice drig bottle would be mine because I think you can regulate how much water you're taking in. But also if you like it, it's all pretty and you know, dope meme.
We're just yeah, you enjoy.
The enjoy the pretty botle, and then you might drinkable.
Yeah. There's not a lot of perks at the moment, not much, not at no weeks.
It's the worst of the worst.
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This episode was produced by Courtney Ammenhauser with audio production by Tom Lyon Next Time.
This episode of Hello Bump was made in partnership with Huggies Bye Bye
