Yikes

I had my 40 week 5 day prenatal appointment this morning, and it was pretty overwhelming.  Against what I had planned on doing, I did step on the scale and actually lost a pound from last time, so that was fun.  But, then I spoke with my midwife, and we discussed induction next Tuesday night using Cervidil and then possibly following up the next day with Pitocin if things haven't progressed.  I started crying immediately.  She reassured me that baby and I had over a week to deal with this, but it was still hard to swallow.  She also spoke with me about scheduling a fetal Non-Stress Test (NST) this coming Friday because I am overdue.  As is routine, I hopped up on the table so that she could measure my fundal height and listen to the baby's heart tones.  As we were listening, I heard the most horrible sound of the heart rate dropping pretty low and staying that way for a few seconds.  She kept listening, and it did it again two more times.  At that point, she said that she'd like to schedule the NST that afternoon just to rule anything out, and I agreed.

At this point, I was a wreck.  I drove home to eat lunch and get Nate and head back to the hospital.  Away we went, and got hooked up right away to the monitor.  After about 30 minutes of listening to the heartbeat, the tech told us that things looked fine, and we still needed to do an ultrasound.  I got pretty excited at this point because our last ultrasound was at 13 weeks (back in October)!  She made sure to be very careful to not show us anything revealing as far as its private parts were concerned.

Because of the fact that we chose to not find out the gender of Mr. Belvedere, coupled with not having gotten a 20-week ultrasound that included an anatomy scan, I have had this completely irrational fear that baby was intersexed--meaning that it couldn't be classified as either male or female.

After the tech did the scan, I asked, "Did you see what it was?"
She replied, "Yes, but I'm not going to tell you."
Nate piped up, "But it's one or the other, right?"

At first she didn't quite get what we were getting at, so I explained my fear.  She then reassured us that yes, we would be bringing home either a boy OR a girl.

Final result?  Everything's fine with baby.  We have another NST scheduled for Friday.