I'm 40+3 weeks but measured at hospital as 36 weeks - is this ok?

[iwouldgoouttonight]

I posted a couple of days ago wondering whether my waters had broken and after a day of pondering decided to phone the hospital just so they could check. They did an internal exam on saturday night and they haven't gone (just lots of discharge - nice!) She also measured my bump with a tape measure and asked if I'd always been measuring small. I told her my midwife has never measured me with a tape measure and the hospital midwife looked a bit surprised and said I was only measuring 36 weeks. She did say it could be that my belly is 'all baby' and not much water, but its just made me think about it since. Could they have got my dates wrong (I have PCOS so haven't had a period for over a year so can't date it from date of last period) or could the baby be small, in which case should they be monitoring me. Or is it quite normal for a baby to be four weeks smaller in size?

Has anyone had an experience of this?

I don't know about such a large difference in dates, but I do know that measurements are only useful when compared to an individual's other measurements. So I might measure bigger than average, but always have measured bigger so that would be normal IYSWIM.

Taking one measurement out of context doesn't give you much info, but I don't know if such a big discrepancy is normal or not.

(I have PCOS too so all my dating has been done by scans BTW)

Did they offer a scan to check dates, or were they quite unconcerned? The only way to check the size properly is a scan.

are you engaged???

I am not a midwife, but I have had five children and I was always told that once baby angages you actually measure less weeks again as your bump 'drops' slightly.

I in fact didn;t even engage until labour with my last four, but I went from measuring 40wks to 38wks in the last week.......which MY midwife told me was expected.

Think the tape measure thing is pretty inaccurate which is why some mws don't bother with it. I was only measured once in my pg (also at hospital - community mws didn't do it) and was 3cm too small, but ds came out on the 50th centile.

If you were dated by scans, this is meant to be very accurate I think? So probably not your dates wrong and just the way your bump is!