What to Expect When You're...

Recently I found out a former coworker is pregnant. When women who already have babies hear about other women carrying babies, they want to spill their guts to these poor souls. Bring on the unwanted advice! So here it is, unsolicited & unedited. 

To the pregnant woman, you need to buy the mother of all pregnancy books, "What To Expect When You're Expecting" or as my mid-wife calls it, "What To Expect When You're Paranoid". And yes, I was paranoid while pregnant with my first and second babies. Who wouldn't be? It's not like billions of women have had babies throughout the centuries. So if you have a copy of said book and you are, admittedly, paranoid, you need to avoid the section in the back entitled "When Things Go Wrong". This section is not for you. You have already imagined the worst and don't need reinforcement. For instance, I was over the proverbial hill when I had my second baby (over 35) and was asked if I wanted to have an amniocentesis.  The 'amnio' is for people who used old and crusty eggs to conceive. The procedure involves sticking a rather long needle into your womb and extracting some of the amniotic fluid. When I first considered this test I thought to myself, "there is a certain amount of fluid in my womb for a reason & maybe I need ALL of it. What will happen if they take some out? Will the little needle hole turn into a bigger hole & all the fluid & the baby will leak out?" Needless to say, I declined this test. I also declined every test that had a high false positive result. So what tests were performed, you ask?

 
I had a lot of blood tests including the HIV test. I knew I didn't have HIV but being paranoid I wondered what would happen if it said "declined test" on my chart. I pictured something going wrong and the doctor looking at my chart and stopping to put on gloves or worse, a bio-hazard suit, before helping me and the baby out. Clearly paranoid, I know. So I had the HIV test twice. Once for my first pregnancy and once for my second. Another test I had is the glucose test. This is where you drink a sugary drink and then have blood extracted to see if your blood sugar is within a safe range. Unfortunately for me I decided to eat breakfast too close to the test.  I had peanut butter and jam on toast and a banana before this test. And then I flunked it. When you flunk this test, they call you right away to schedule a follow up three-hour fasting test. This was not good for me. I was riddled with worry from the time I heard my first results until I got my second test results back. This was 4 days but it seemed like a century. I'm also not very good at fasting. Fasting to me is not snacking in between meals. This was a difficult time. I ended up not having gestational diabetes, or anything equally as worrisome, but I did think if anything was going to give me gestational diabetes, it was the sugary drink pregnant women have to drink for the test. That drink is worse than the McDonald's orange soda I remember having in the Happy Meal when I was a kid. Now you can at least get apple juice or some other fruit juice. Maybe someday pregnant women will have a choice of sugary products for the glucose tolerance test. Maybe even chocolate or better still, a chocolate muffin. Muffins are a pregnant woman's friend. Muffins are just glorified cupcakes but for some reason, they can be eaten guilt free. But I digress.

Most of us really look forward to the ultrasound test to get a sneak peak at our little one. If you aren't considered high-risk, you will get one of these tests at around 4 months and will not need one again unless your health care practitioner has concerns or needs a weight estimate. You'll get print outs of your growing baby and can show them off to all your friends and family. At this time you can find out the sex of the baby, if you choose. For the people that are able to find the image in those 3D Halogram pictures, you may even be able to figure out the sex yourself. Both my babies were doing some sort of gymnastics moves so we really couldn't see much except maybe a head and some feet. We took the practitioners word that all the necessary parts were present.

And present they were, especially the vocal chords. So after surviving more than 9 months of utter paranoia, we became the proud owners of not one but two baby girls (two years apart, of course). Neither of which came with instruction manuals. I'd tell you to pick up the book, "What To Expect In the First Year" but, truthfully, we didn't read it and after a while, your baby will stand on it to reach all your breakables. So next week I will cover the topic "What To Expect In the First Year When You're Paranoid". Not that there's anything wrong with being paranoid.