Can anything compare with seeing your unborn baby’s heart-beat on sonar or hearing it with the doptone for the first time? It makes your pregnancy (planned or not) very real. The flashing spot you see on the screen is your baby’s tiny heart, pumping its own blood through its teeny-tiny body the size of a grain of rice when it’s only 28 days old!
Imagine, of the five-hundred-million sperm that left the comfort-zone of the epididymis (store-room for sperm in the testicle) a single marathon winner got to meet with your waiting egg (ova). For your body, this was a celebration of note because for years, your ovaries have been nurturing precious eggs like a string of debutantes, and for years has been disappointed – hence your periods. But this time, your hormones recognised a change in your cycle and quickly responded to ensure your baby’s survival. Progesterone – a hormone meaning ‘in favour of’ (pro) gestation (conception) – flooded your blood stream to alert ‘receptive cells’ in the womb, cervix (mouth of the womb) and breast tissue of the good news. Your body was on ‘high-alert’ for the first 10 – 14 days to protect the fertilized egg journeying through the Fallopian tube towards your womb (uterus).
There, hidden, protected, nurtured, cell by cell the egg divided into three compartments – the ectoderm for outer tissue such as the skin, hair and nails, the brain, spinal cord and neurons. Note that the skin and the brain are connected from the beginning! The mesoderm – this forms the skeleton, bones and connective tissue, the heart muscles, lymph tissue, kidneys and testicles or ovaries. Finally the endoderm – this tissue lines most of the body’s internal organs so it’s found practically everywhere.
Join me now on this journey to motherhood (and fatherhood – men are welcome) to share the joys and sorrows, the pit stops and the pitfalls of having children. It’s a place where we can share the advice that every woman needs – and every mother years to give.
