Heartbeat

As you probably know Mark does medical research, currently he is working on fetal cardiology. This means that I get to be the dutiful wife and provide a baby to scan. The hardships I endure for Mark's work :-) Yesterday was another of these scans, and we saw some great images of TinyBaby(I will post them soon).

The problem we had was that he was feeling very active compared to the previous scans. The scan sweeps over the heart taking multiple images, which Mark has to turn into a 3D image. This scan takes between 5 and 10 seconds, and I have to hold my breath to avoid motion on the image. TinyBaby doesn't breath, so that isn't the problem, however he does like wiggling. The number of scans that we started but had to reject because he moved was quite large, however we got a few good scans. I had assumed that he always moved the same amount through my pregnancy, but I only felt it later on. However I think he may get more active as he gets older, and presumably his muscles get stronger, so it isn't so tiring.

One of the interesting things that we saw was his heart rate when he moved. Obviously you would expect his heart rate to increase when he is wiggling, however a few seconds before he moved his heart rate would increase. Perhaps he was having a think about what he was going to do, and his body was anticipating the movement.