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Well when a patient finds out she is pregnant and she comes
to the office for her first OB visit we have them initially
see the nurse, Gaye Becker, and Gaye takes their history.
We're particulary interested in their medical history-what
kind of medical conditions they've had. Do they have diabetes,
do they have hypertension? What they're family history is.
Are their any genetic concerns that we need to address? And
then we go over some of the labortory that we'll be drawing
which includes typical OB/GYN labs checking their blood count,
their blood type, whether they've been exposed to rubella,
hepatitis. These are just the standard OB panel that we get.
There's additional tests now that are available that when we
were having kids years ago we never even had to be concerned
with-Genetic testing, that could include testing for Downs Syndrom,
and a whole myrad of things that are now available. And those
are optional tests. Patients can do those if they wish, if they
don't want to do them they don't have to. There's ultrasounds
that are involved and we usually get the patient scheduled fairly
soon for an ultrasound, because a lot of the testing that we do
will be based on the dating that we want to confirm with the early
ultrasound. So we will try to get an early scan somewhere around 9
weeks or so. With the first OB visit sometime after the first
missed period is when we like to see the patients. And then after
the nurse talks about their genetic history, their family history,
what their past medical history and surgery history has been, they
see the nurse practitioner or the doctor and we do a full physical
exam to include PAP smear, if it's time to do one, and some cultures
from the *** and check to see how big the uterus is. If your around
12 weeks thats when you can first hear a baby's heart beat with our
doppler-so that's always an exciting time take the doppler and hear the
baby's heart beat for the first time. Then we go over a lot of the
important pre natal issues that include dietary concerns. Some of our
patients today are already on a perfect diet eating just what their
mothers taught them to eat when they were little, and some of our
patients aren't quite doing that well. So we address dietary issues
talking about protein and calories, not overdoing the sugars and
sweets, cakes, candies and ice cream and all those things. Those
things we try to address and encourage them to not overdo that.