I'm going to share my story with you, because to be honest, my heart sunk here because your story is very familiar to me.
It was always hard to find the heart tones on my son Eli, who is 3 months old now, no matter who did it -- nurse, doctor, whoever. You'd find it, and then you wouldn't, and it was all over the place.
I was also huge. Enormous. I looked full-term pregnant by the time I was 6 months along. I chalked it up to the fact that I am very, very short. But by the time I was 33 weeks pregnant, I measured a full 40+ weeks, and my OB sent me for a specialty ultrasound at a MFM clinic to find out what was going on. We knew it wasn't twins, but I was a little iffy on dates, I thought I could be as much as 3 weeks more pregnant than the dates we were using. I figured I would just have a bigger baby because I was further along than we'd assumed, and I was totally looking forward to the extra ultrasound to get more baby pics!
Then we got to the extra ultrasound and the techs were kind of looking around all weirdly, and they weren't talking much, and we became concerned. I could see the measurements they were taking up on the screen, and they were all consistent with the 34 week fetus I was then carrying -- except for the stomach. It measured something crazy like 28 weeks. Weird, huh?
So they grilled me and grilled me about my glucose test (which I'd passed with flying colors) and my blood pressure (which has always been low, even when I was pregnant) and I was just like, WTF guys? Then they told me -- it was excess amniotic fluid! Psh, I thought! Whatever! I googled and it said it was usually nothing, just some extra fluid, the vast majority of the time. It could also be gestational diabetes, which I knew I couldn't possibly have, and there was a small chance there would be something wrong with the baby's digestive system where it wasn't swallowing right. I figured it was the Nothing choice. They sent me to a... fetologist? I don't think that's the right word, but a guy who was a fetus expert and did fetal surgery and all kinds of crazy stuff.
First, a tech did the ultrasound. She couldn't find a stomach bubble. Just plain couldn't find it. I was freaking out.
Then the fetologist came in and did his thing. He said he found the stomach, he saw the baby swallowing, he said everything was just fine. I had to go back for non-stress tests every week the rest of the pregnancy, but it was fine. Just severe polyhydramnios, that's all -- your normal amniotic fluid index is, I think, 15 to 20 cm. I had 30 to 35!!! They were going to just doublecheck the baby when he was born and make sure everything was okay. And we had to be really careful if my water broke before I went into the hospital -- when you have polyhydramnios, your baby never engages into the pelvis. But if your water breaks, the baby immediately engages into the pelvis, and there is a huge, huge, huge risk of cord prolapse and strangulation because it happens so swiftly.
Anyway. Eli was born at 39 weeks, and we chose to have a controlled induction and artificial rupture of membranes for his safety. He came out just fine, well, he had an extra thumb, but the pediatrician checked him over and said everything else was perfect.
It was weird -- he didn't eat for more than a few minutes at a time, but heck, he was a newborn! And he kept coughing up this weird foamy stuff. Everybody figured it was just crud from his respiratory system that didn't get squeezed out because he ended up being a C-section.
After being awake for 48 hours, I finally decided at midnight the night after his birth that I HAD to get some sleep, which I hadn't been able to do because I was paranoid he'd cough up some more of that crap and choke on it. So I gave him to the nurse for a few hours and she was going to bring him to me if he got hungry, and I was going to be able to get a few hours.
Our lives completely changed that night.
About 5 in the morning on July 25, a doctor came and woke me up and took a seat in my room. Eli had coughed up more stuff. And then he had aspirated the stuff, and turned blue, and fainted, and then had a seizure, and had bloody stool. He was only saved from death after the hypoxic episode and subsequent seizure by quickly being "bagged," put on oxygen and given immediate resuscitation. If we had been home sleeping that night, Eli would have died or have irreversible, severe brain damage. As quickly as paramedics come, they wouldn't have arrived quickly enough for little Eli.
I got to see my baby one more time before he was taken to the regional NICU for suspected infection. He was hooked up to so many horrible tubes and the oxygen and he was lying in a bili bed, his eyes covered. It was horrifying. We stood there and just cried.
They figured out what his problem was pretty much immediately. He had a condition called tracheoesophageal fistula with esophageal atresia. Basically, that means his esophagus came from his mouth and ended in a blind pouch and the end coming from his stomach attached to his trachea instead. The crap he'd been coughing up was colostrum that sat in the pouch awhile and came straight back up. That's why he never digested any of his amniotic fluid. That's why I was so big.
They were able to do Eli's lifesaving surgery on his fifth day of life, and though he spent over two months in the hospital, he is home now, eating like a champ, and very happy.
But if we'd ignored the signs, if we'd figured he was just a big baby or twins or whatever, and if we had been planning a homebirth, things would have gone very badly and very wrong for poor Eli. He would, to be honest with you, he would be dead today.
I tell you all this just to give you and your husband a very, very big reason that you need to go get an ultrasound and see what's going on. You need to check on things. It could be nothing, or it could be twins, or something, but this sounds so familiar to me, and if you have another Eli, I want him to be safe. I want him to be lucky. Please, please, please, for the sake of your little one, make sure everything is okay.
There are 3D places in the area if I decide to get one. Thanks again!
that's crappy. You have had a lot of babies in a short period of time. Honestly, you probably NEED to eat more than you are eating because it's likely that whatever you have left over in your body is pretty minimal at this point. What's so awesome about him? I know you've had a bunch of kids with him, and leaving doesnt sound like it's on your mind right now, but I wish you were with someone who had more respect for you than that. 
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