Thursday, July 30, 2009

Gestational logorrhea: week 11

Met with a midwife yesterday, as part of my transition away from baby factories and hopefully towards a more slow-moving, considerate type of care. Slow-moving also means I am going to have to put up with waiting room time - up to two hours on bad days, I have been warned. The midwives I'm working with are essentially squatters within the office of an "OB to the stars" type doctor (who happens to have a soft spot for natural childbirth). We sat in his office to get my medical history down, and he popped in on us, needing to use the phone at his desk, but immediately gave up and went looking for another phone. My medical history is a long litany of, "no, no, nope, none, not that either." I am fortunate.

The midwife I met with happens to be the nurse who was on duty at the hospital when I delivered Jonah. It was such a pleasure to fill her in on the past 2.5 years, and I was quite moved that I'll get to work with her again. She made my extremely fast labor seem like something I could handle, and eventually I forgot that I had my husband and mother (and OB) there for support, and focused on her only.

The medical part of the visit was brief - urine sample, blood pressure, weight check (on a scale not as forgiving as the one I'd been on at the doctor's), and then an attempt to find the heartbeat with a Doppler (handheld audio device, more primitive than a sonogram). No heartbeat was found. The midwife offered to get the doctor in to do a quick sonogram to ease my mind (which wasn't at all troubled), but I truly felt like I could wait another week (next Wednesday I go to the hospital for a higher-level ultrasound that will begin to give us our odds for birth defects), so I passed. Sorry, Baby Fig, I don't have it in me (yet?) to be neurotic on your behalf. I just know you're OK in there, otherwise I wouldn't be OK.

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