What To Expect During First Prenatal Visit

Scheduling for first prenatal visit with your midwife or doctor is one important thing you should do as soon as you know you're pregnant. This is unless you decided to do the prenatal care yourself like unassisted home birthers do. If you're not planning to have an unassisted home birth, then establishing prenatal care with your caregiver is highly recommended.

But before talking about what to expect during first prenatal appointment, let's see the importance of prenatal care first.

While during prenatal care you're weighed and measured, it is wrong to assume that prenatal care only consists of checking things on by weighing, measuring and diet monitoring. Prenatal check up is much more than that.

It consists also of watching and testing/screening to see whether you remain low risk. Bear in mind that high blood pressure, preclampsia and diabetes can set in during pregnancy.

Routine check up will spot on potential problems long before it becomes problematic. For instance, high sugar as well as spill out of protein in urine should be treated seriously via diet to prevent it becoming diabetes and preclampsia, respectively.

Prenatal care is also about the baby. If, through prenatal testing, abnormalities are found, then these problems can be addressed, for instance in utero treatment. Some abnormalities may also require specific medical facilities after birth.

In short, prenatal care is set up to ensure the health and safety of mother and baby.

Whether you're seeing a midwife or a doctor, your first prenatal appointment is likely to be the longest one. Usually the first prenatal check up is scheduled when you're approximately 8 week pregnant unless you have had problems in the past, or are having problems at the moment.

These are the list of things your health practitioner would like to know during the first prenatal visit:

• Your menstrual cycle history. This is important to assess your reproductive well-being, as well as, to estimate your delivery date.
  
  
• Your and your family health history, including genetic and birth defect history.
  
  
• Your activities, habits,and living condition, so that your caregiver can determine whether you have condition which can affect your safety and emotional well-being.
  
  
• The medication or supplement you've taken since your last menstrual period to assess whether you've ingested potentially harmful substance.

Once your caregiver interviews you, the caregiver will give you advice of what you should or shouldn't do to take care of yourself during pregnancy and order prenatal testing which is suitable for your condition. Now, the price of prenatal testing varies, depending on what your health care provider orders. Midwives tend to order the most important test for a particular patient condition, instead of ordering test indiscriminately. I was asked to only provide urine and blood for ob panel test (the standard basic test) at a health lab close to where I live and it cost only $80. But I've also heard moms paying hundreds of dollars for initial prenatal test, ordered during first prenatal visit by their ob gyns.

Your health care provide may also ask you to getsome vitamin and mineral supplement to support your and your baby well-being. If you have a midwife as your caregiver, you'll find that she will emphasize a lot on this aspect; a midwife is likely to give you a long talk on nutrition and how to take care of yourself properly to avoid pregnancy and childbirth problem in the future. This is not a 'lecture' type of talk, but with my midwife, at least, she informed me the consequences of not having a good nutrition on my baby, my labor, pregnancy and general health.

In addition, during the first prenatal visit, your caregiver will ask you to sign the necessary paperwork to continue on the care with him/her.

Finally, during your first prenatal appointment, your caregiver will also perform standard physical examination including measurement of the fundal height (i.e. the stomach), blood pressure, heart pulse, and your weight. Depending on your caregiver, you may also be asked to confirm your pregnancy other than using the home pregnancy test.

Apart from providing your healthcare provider information as outlined above, you can use the first prenatal check up to see whether you're comfortable with the doctor or midwife you choose.

As a client, you should be comfortable enough with your caregiver to ask your caregiver questions or letting him/her know of potential problems. For instance, you can let him/her know about your morning sickness and ask for advice, or stomach ache or cramp which you may experience, and so forth. You should also be comfortable to ask about childbirth and even question procedures your caregiver proposes.

If you are with a midwife, you can even tell her your situation, even if it does not pertain to your health per se. Midwives, are more open to long prenatal appointment and are more willing to spend time to listen to your concern. This is because midwife's philosophy is to give a complete care, which includes emotional care, because emotional state of a conceiving woman can influence the degree of how she can or will look after herself during pregnancy.

In short, whoever caregiver you choose, you should be comfortable enough to have repeated prenatal check up with him or her,not just the first prenatal visit.

Click here to see what you should expect for the subsequent prenatal check up.

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Child birth preparation articles:

• Natural child birth preparation
• Natural childbirth tips - tips for maximizing your chance of having a natural birth.
• Finding and choosing good birthing class
• Natural childbirth video - why you should watch it and what to watch
• List of best pregnancy books

For prospective homebirth moms: Preparation for giving birth at home.

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