Stress Test vs. Non-Stress Test

A few years ago, my father went to the hospital for a stress test. They had him run on a treadmill while they monitored various heart-related things. The end result, as my mother tells it, is that he went straight from the treadmill to a gurney to having surgery for a blocked artery that had been previously undetected. The particular nature of this type of blocked artery is apparently nicknamed 'the widowmaker'; it's what killed John Ritter. So, stress tests are our friends for catching hidden things.

I had a non-stress test a few days ago, ordered by the on-call doctor when I called circa 6pm to find out if I should be worried that I'd gone a day without feeling any wriggling in my belly. He was all, "yeeah, come on down right now and we'll do a non-stress test to check you out." Since I knew a stress test involved running on a treadmill, I figured a non-stress test would involve lying in a bed. Do you know what? It totally does.

Here is what a non-stress test is: I lie on a bed while a nurse hooks up two little round monitors on my belly - one to monitor contractions (this one proved unnecessary for me), and one to monitor the baby's heart rate. It took a while to find a good place for monitoring the heart rate, because the baby was turned around, facing in with her back to us. The nurse said that that position is probably why I couldn't feel her moving. They keep the monitor going for 20 minutes, and they look for at least two spikes in the heart rate in that time - the baby's heart rate spikes when she moves around, so they're trying to monitor for movement.

I don't think I've mentioned this before on the blog, but D and I have a theory that the baby does not like it when people try to listen in on her business. She does not care for wiretaps. She squirms at my OB appointments when they listen for her heartbeat with the Doppler thingy, and at the second ultrasound in January, she stuck her tongue out at us and threw what the tech described as a bit of a tantrum. (I'm sorry to say this, but she probably gets that attitude from me. D's very even-keeled.)
Anyway, so baby hates wiretaps, and this non-stress test clearly put her off, because she was all about moving around to evade the heartrate monitor. Which, of course, was great! Good Fetus! Squirm away! She was good at squirming, which meant the nurse kept having to readjust the monitor thing to re-find the heartrate, but once we were all done, she brought the read-out sheet to the on-call doctor, who cleared me to go. I never met the doctor, which is too bad, because he might end up being the one on-duty when I have the baby, but not being a priority just means that everything is going well.

And everything is going well - there's been plenty of squirming since the test; I guess baby realized that if she takes a day off, she might get her privacy interrupted, so she's not about to take another day off. Won't she be pissed when she finds herself in another ultrasound next week!
That's right, we're going back in. I'm still carrying bigger than I'm supposed to, so maybe Bob the Tech can figure out why.