LOL at 'serene thing from serenesville'! I used some hypnobirthing techniques and I can assure you at 8cm I was much more Amityville. Which is not to say I wouldn't recommend it: the ante-natal meditations and breathing exercises are very good for relaxation and instilling a sense of control in the last trimester, and I used the visualisations of what is happening quite a lot during labour.
However, just as hypnotism doesn't work on everyone, I think different people will experience different levels of pain relief using hypnobirthing, although to be fair I didn't give it the best chance to work, since I did spend the first two hours of labour shifting furniture and filling a pool.
If there are no complications, then I will be having this baby at home, wheredidmyfeetgo, justbeme but I am a bit of a 'wussy' homebirther and everything has to be just so: first sign of any problems and I shall hammering at the hospital's door.
As for my sudden burst of Positive Mental Attitude re the scan I have no idea where it came from and wish I could turn it on at will - it would have been handy during the first trimester and a half of this pregnancy, where just like everyone else, over-anxiety seems to have been my stalker. They can do the blood test either next week, when I'm going to see the Fetal Medecine people, or at my 24 weeks bloods. I'm not fussed either way, tbh - it's way too late for me to consider a termination for anything other than a fatal defect, which cystic fibrosis isn't, at least not in utero, so the results of the bloods would just be useful to avoid nasty shocks.
It helps that it was only a very tiny section of bowel that was echogenic - the sonographer said it's quite common for the brightness to disappear if you use a different machine, so I'm going to assume initially that it's a technical problem to do with the machines, unless I get a more serious result from a second scan.