My uterus measures smaller than dates by two weeks. No one seems to care. It was always on date until now. With my son, my uterus was on date until the third trimester, when it dropped off and leveled out at two weeks behind. Two weeks behind is not considered clinically concerning. I feel like giving birth to a dead child should earn you a slightly more liberal view of what is and is not clinically concerning. I wish I could get someone besides me to worry about this baby's growth. Oliver may have had a cord accident, but he was also too small. 5 lbs 12 oz is not a reasonable size for a full term baby who is 21 inches long. 21 inches is a long baby. If he'd weighed between 7 and 8 pounds, he'd still have been very thin. Less than 6 is not a healthy size for a baby that long. The only person who's ever acknowledged it as an issue is an OB who thought him being thin and weak was a factor in his death. But my uterus was never more than 2 weeks behind then either. So at what point will anyone be worried? When this baby dies too?

Last night at work, I got my water down from the shelf where it's stored and started to take a drink. I try so hard to be conscientious about fluid intake. I passed out at the grocery store once during this pregnancy already, and the only thing anyone attributed it to that seemed plausible to me was dehydration. So I drink a lot of water.
As I drank my water, a woman approached me and said "You're killing your baby." And I stared at her and thought surely I had imagined it. But she said it again. She said "You're killing your baby, whenever you reach for something you're wrapping its cord around its neck and killing it. My sister killed her baby that way and you will too." My first thought was to crawl under the desk and cry, and refuse to come out until someone came and rescued me from this nightmare that is my journey to motherhood. Refuse to come out until someone agreed that this is enough, that this is enough pain, and agreed to just hand me my child alive and breathing.
I stared at the woman, and then I walked away. She was a patient. Her bed was in the hallway, in the center of the department. No matter where I went or what work I tried to do, she was there. And whenever she could catch my eye, she would start again "Don't forget. . ." and I would walk faster.