I always appreciate a good moment of comic relief when I'm overcome with anxiety. So I was actually more than a little relieved when the cap flew out of the gel bottle yesterday as the tech squirted gel on my middle in preparation for my 18-week anatomy scan, sending a big clump of warm goo sliding down toward the top of my pants. I laughed out loud, though the tech (who seemed, overall, lacking in humor), ironically, didn't think it was as funny as I did. It broke up the intensity of the moment.
She started the scan and, for inexplicable reasons, opted to first focus on one of the uterine fibroids that, yes, I am aware that I have. Can someone please tell me why they do this? Are they trying to drive us crazy? I came here to make sure that the child growing inside of me is thriving and healthy. Would you mind leaving that benign mass on the other side of my uterus alone until we get that 411? I asked her if she could please first take a quick peek at the baby to be sure he or she was okay ("go with the flow" is, unfortunately for health care providers, not my motto in situations like this). She assured me that she'd already seen the baby move before focusing on the fibroid, wrapped up her scrutiny of other parts and then panned over to the baby, whose steady, beating heart we saw immediately.
She slowly made her way across the anatomical landscape of the baby, pointing out the four chambers of the heart, the stomach, the kidneys, an arm bone and the umbilical cord. She spent a little too much time on the baby's brain, which sent my decreasing anxiety right back up the scale. Sensing this, she suggested that maybe she wasn't talking enough, telling me what she was doing. I told her a play-by-play would be really helpful, and it turned out to be, particularly as I squinted at the screen trying to decipher what I was seeing. Frankly, I don't know how they get anything from those images. I kept uttering "uh-huh" everytime she asked if we could see certain things, only because I felt it would be a poor reflection on my nascent motherhood if I admitted that actually, I couldn't see my baby's parts at all.
But I did see the baby's gorgeous, unmistakeable profile. The stretching out of long fingers and the adorable heel of a foot. A real, boisterous baby moving every which way inside of me. And oh, would it be impossible for someone to stop themselves from falling head-over-heels.
We'd told her that we wanted to know the gender, but as she was wrapping up she still hadn't gotten a clear view. She got a couple more pictures and then said she had everything she needed. Come again? She may have had everything she needed, but we were missing our one opportunity to get that critical information. I asked her, I'm afraid in a voice that may have had a tinge of whine in it, if she could do one eensy weensy last quick scan to see if she could find the gender-identifying part. I wasn't sure what she'd say – as I said, she wasn't the warmest – but she complied. And this time she found it right away. She asked if we could take a guess based on what was on the screen. I didn't see anything distinguishable, so I assumed a girl. "Look again," she said. "I don't think so." We took a closer look, and my husband (naturally) saw it first. She couldn't get a clear view of the whole thing, which made her think there was a small margin for error. But unless there is a random twig or pencil or other foreign object in there, we're having a boy. The other tech looked at it and said, 100%, it's a boy.
A boy. Oh boy. Let the fun begin. Though I felt terrible guilt admitting to myself that I was wishing for one or the other (how could I, after everything I'd been through, dare to hope upon hope that the baby would be anything but whatever it is?), I've always imagined myself as a mother to boys. Loud, rowdy, larger-than-life boys that I would drive around to hockey practice and other boy things. And here, spinning around in my uterus, is one of them. How can I describe the joy?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Take a Number
I think I'm starting to get the hang of this prenatal visit thing.
You sign in, a nurse calls you back, you pee on a tiny matchstick-sized paper with two colored dots on it and show it to her so she can determine if the dots changed color or something (All I know is it is impossible to know what to do with this stick once you pee on it for the required few seconds. You are still on the toilet, peeing, and you need your hands to wipe and pull up your pants. But you're holding a tiny stick that has pee on it, so eeew, you don't really want to set it down on the sink because then you may put microscopic drops of pee on the sink that other people have to use. But you don't want to put it on the floor, either, so really, do you have a choice?). Then you go back to the waiting room. Then eventually they call your name again. But first you might learn that your doctor has been called to two deliveries. And you therefore might end up seeing a different doctor in the practice, but at that point you don't care because a) you've already been waiting an hour and a half, you have to pee again and you're hungry, and b) as long as someone with an MD from an accredited medical school (doesn't even have to be top-tier) tells you everything is fine, that afternoon, you know you'll be a happy camper.
Such was the case for me, last week, at my 16-week prenatal visit. Need I even tell you – I was incredibly nervous, upset stomach, blahblahblah. The doctor who finally met with us turned out to be the head of the practice (so yes, he had an MD, from Harvard it turns out, so he passed), a man with kind eyes and a demeanor that instantly put me at ease. He came in and asked how I was feeling. I told him a few of the symptoms I'd had (mainly headaches), which he pronounced completely normal. I asked him if it was normal for the ravenous hunger of the first trimester to wane a bit; he looked at my chart and suggested that, since I'd gained nearly seven pounds since July 15, I was probably eating enough.
Then he did measurements – felt where my uterus was (halfway up to my belly button, which apparently is where it's supposed to be), measured its height and listened to the baby's heartbeat. I took out my list of questions, mentally crossed off the more neurotic ones and asked him a few. Then my husband and I were on our way.
An hour and a half wait for a ten-minute visit. But I got what I went there for: reassurance and more reason for confidence. For that, I would've waited all night long.
You sign in, a nurse calls you back, you pee on a tiny matchstick-sized paper with two colored dots on it and show it to her so she can determine if the dots changed color or something (All I know is it is impossible to know what to do with this stick once you pee on it for the required few seconds. You are still on the toilet, peeing, and you need your hands to wipe and pull up your pants. But you're holding a tiny stick that has pee on it, so eeew, you don't really want to set it down on the sink because then you may put microscopic drops of pee on the sink that other people have to use. But you don't want to put it on the floor, either, so really, do you have a choice?). Then you go back to the waiting room. Then eventually they call your name again. But first you might learn that your doctor has been called to two deliveries. And you therefore might end up seeing a different doctor in the practice, but at that point you don't care because a) you've already been waiting an hour and a half, you have to pee again and you're hungry, and b) as long as someone with an MD from an accredited medical school (doesn't even have to be top-tier) tells you everything is fine, that afternoon, you know you'll be a happy camper.
Such was the case for me, last week, at my 16-week prenatal visit. Need I even tell you – I was incredibly nervous, upset stomach, blahblahblah. The doctor who finally met with us turned out to be the head of the practice (so yes, he had an MD, from Harvard it turns out, so he passed), a man with kind eyes and a demeanor that instantly put me at ease. He came in and asked how I was feeling. I told him a few of the symptoms I'd had (mainly headaches), which he pronounced completely normal. I asked him if it was normal for the ravenous hunger of the first trimester to wane a bit; he looked at my chart and suggested that, since I'd gained nearly seven pounds since July 15, I was probably eating enough.
Then he did measurements – felt where my uterus was (halfway up to my belly button, which apparently is where it's supposed to be), measured its height and listened to the baby's heartbeat. I took out my list of questions, mentally crossed off the more neurotic ones and asked him a few. Then my husband and I were on our way.
An hour and a half wait for a ten-minute visit. But I got what I went there for: reassurance and more reason for confidence. For that, I would've waited all night long.
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