Guilt, Party of One, Your Table is Ready

So I scheduled the amnio.  What else would I do, really.  Statistics don't work for me.  That I might be the one in however many thousands who might hold the (defective) bean is something my psyche could not stomach.  And the anxiety, crying jags, shakes, and erratic behavior set it.

I made the appointment and told no one besides my mothers-in-law, my husband, and my best friend.  I didn't want to hear one more bit of advice, read one Internet anecdote about an amnio gone bad, or have one more person telling me that they "had a friend who..." I needed radio silence.  And I was smart enough to know that the people I told respected my decision, or even outright supported it.  I was tipping the scale in my favor with absolute impunity.

I think it was a stroke of luck that my husband couldn't accompany me to the doctor's office that day.  Not that he's not supportive, but he's not as, say, indulgent, of my fears as my friends or my mothers-in-law.  I needed someone who could coddle me, not by feeding my fears, but by acknowledging them.  Someone who would allow me to own and hold these fears, and then just BE THERE. I think we all know what I'm talking about here:  I needed a woman by my side.

I got two.  Boy, did I hit the jackpot in the wedding lottery.  I hear mother-in-law horror stories all the time, but I have none of those.  If there was a divorce, I know who would be on MY side in the courtroom.  Seriously, I couldn't have dreamed up a better Amnio Dream Team.

One mother-in-law, who I'll call Mother Hen, sat in the waiting room and tried to remain calm by pacing the waiting room while the other one MIL did bedside duty.  Nurse Reddi, I'll call her. You want Nurse Reddi, or someone just like her, at your bedside.  Nurse Reddi was the one who held my hand and watched the doctor like a hawk.  Nurse Reddi was the one who whispered to me, conspiratorially, "I like him, he knows what he's doing.  I feel really good about this" when the doctor briefly left the room before the procedure.  Nurse Reddi also had the presence of mind to ask questions and remember the answers, like, when the tests would come back, if we could order a rush on them, and even asked about checking on some random birth defect even I hadn't heard of.  Nurse Reddi does online research prior to taking her place next to the bed.  I recommend you find your own Nurse Reddi and hang on for dear life.

I'm not a queasy, or easily grossed out sort of person.  I love looking at the needle when I'm having blood drawn.  If there was a full-time Surgery Channel option on my cable subscription, I would definitely add it.  In HD.  I can talk about knee surgery or a bout of diarrhea at the dinner table as I shovel steak into my mouth.

But I was unable to stomach the thought of watching the amnio needle enter my belly for this test.  All I could do was apologize silently to the fetus for what I was about to do.  A sharp object was about to invade his warm, wet, haven, and I had signed the papers to do so.  I am so sorry, I said.  But momma needs to sleep through the next five months without the assistance of opiates.

I'm not going to lie.  It hurts.  Not a lot, but it's a pain that I've never experienced before, I guess because it's not every day that your womb cramps up from being punctured with a 22-gauge needle.  In case you are wondering, that is incredible thin.  I had assumed it was going to be about two or three times as thick as a strand of spaghetti.  In actuality, it resembles the sort of needles used to draw your blood, maybe even thinner.  Also, I had mistakenly thought that the needle went into the belly button.  Again, not so.  The doctor uses the magic ultrasound wand to look for the best pockets of amniotic fluid, and then constantly looks at the screen to help him guide the needle to the fluid.  As soon as the needle goes in, the uterus reacts by cramping up -- there's the pain.  I pictured a jellyfish contracting in the water when I felt this.  The remainder of the time was spent pain-free, but it was the longest 60-seconds or so of my life.  That's when the doctor is piping out a couple of test tubes' worth of amniotic fluid.  (It takes so long because the needle is so thin.)

And then, that's it.  I was allowed to go home and rest for before resuming a somewhat normal life -- no heavy lifting, sex (that this would even be a remote consideration by a husband after an invasive procedure, is, in my opinion, a precursor to filing for divorce), or air travel, that sort of thing.  Oh, you also have to check for signs of leakage or blood.  I thought that the leak would come from my stomach, the place where the needle went in -- again, I imagined a sea creature, this time a whale, spouting out amniotic fluid from it's blowhole.  But no, the leak comes out the vagina.  These are the lessons learned by warm glow of an ultrasound screen.

So I was released on my own recognizance.  But I still had Mother Hen and Nurse Reddi, the ultimate Recovery Tag Team.  They all but took me out in a fireman's carry.  On the way to the car, there was much debate among the two of them as to whether or not I should proceed along a short incline or walk down small set of stairs.  I took the stairs while they evaluated.

The rest of my day was spent on my couch.  Mother Hen delivered my favorite foods and Nurse Reddi filled my water glass and they both spent a full six hours talking with me about every subject under the blue sky -- except amniocentesis.  If there is a medal for "Care in the Service of the Neurotic" these two earned it twice over.

After my Florence Nightingales left me in the ahem, care of, my betrothed, my night was once again, sleepless.  This time it was because of my trips to the toilet to check for leakage or blood (there was none), and because I would not leave the confines of the couch.  The remote became my talisman, the television, my companion, late into the night, while I monitored the cramping that the doctor had warned me about, and which he emphatically reminded me was perfectly normal.  Two Tylenol later, I finally nodded off under the watchful glow of Iron Chef.

The next two days would be a reprise of the first.  Bathroom, couch, kitchen, couch.  Though I was told one days' rest was sufficient,  I convinced myself that three days' rest would more fully insure me against the worst.  Three days passed, then three more, then three weeks, then five, and the memory of that morning fades more and more as the fetus slowly morphs from "it" to "him."

Order Up: Ham and Pea Salad with a side of Anxiety

I think it might have been just as well that none of you had to live through the first four months of this pregnancy.  Not unless you like to read an endless trail of whining, complaining, groaning, and “why-me-ing” online.  The other reason I was unable to bring myself to write on this blog during the first trimester of my pregnancy was because I was alternately nauseous and certifiably insane.

The nausea.  Ahh, those, lazy, crazy, heady days of stomach-churning nausea.  Not being able to throw up, and yet not being able to stomach the sight, smell, or taste of anything meant for human consumption.  I stopped cooking altogether.  My husband began to lose weight.  You hear about the partners of pregnant women gaining sympathy pounds.   Well, my husband lost inches off his waistline.  He should thank me.

I also happened to go on a vacation to Texas during my first trimester.  There was a plethora of items which nearly incited projectile vomiting.  Texas BBQ?  Normally, I would have been a huge fan, gorging on tender, juicy meats. ribs, you name it.  The smell instead translated into the most primitive of roasting decaying flesh, often accompanied by acrid, vinegary sauces, and sides that made me dry-heave behind my napkin while sitting at diners: imagine ham and pea salad laden with globs of mayonnaise and celery salt and you have an idea of what sort of culinary torture I was enduring.  

Or, it could have been the continuous site of signs for the George W. Bush Turnpike.

I felt so guilty for not wanting to eat anything, and fearful that I was depriving the zygote nutrition, that when I got back home, I compensated by force-feeding myself cheeseburgers.  I must have had five, six, burgers a week.  As far as my pregnancy logic went, cheeseburgers had all of the components essential to healthy fetal growth and development.   Think about the components of a cheeseburger and tell me you don’t agree. The truth is, even cheeseburgers made me want to hurl, but I swallowed them because I was sacrificing myself for my unborn child.  It better appreciate this someday, I thought.  Like when it thanked me for winning an Olympic gold medal, or practiced the piano without complaint.  

Truth is, the only “food” I could stomach was lemonade.  Anything liquid, cold, and lemon-flavored.  I didn’t care what it was, as long as it was made up of those three components.  It’s a wonder I haven’t developed an ulcer.

When I wasn’t on a rampage to find lemonade, I was trying to keep from having a nervous breakdown.  I could not keep it together.  The crying jags were taking a toll on my relationship.

“You have GOT to get it together” my husband would tell me.

But I was too worried.  Too worried that something was horribly wrong with the fetus.  Understand that I wasn’t just worried that it would die.  I was just as worried that it wouldn’t.  If something was wrong with it, I wanted something else to make the decision for me.  I have always been grateful that if the other two pregnancies I had “resolved” themselves --- if indeed they were not viable and that was the reason – though I will never know the reason why.  That’s part of the cruelty of miscarriages, you have no idea if it was something you did,or didn’t, do, or if there was just something horribly wrong with the chromosomes that made up those bundles of cells.  As the pregnancy advanced, I worried about all of the things that it could possibly have, but survive in the womb.  I was worried I was being tricked into being happy about being pregnant.

My fears ranged from spina bifida to Down’s Syndrome to open-heart to it missing part of its brain to – this is a good one, wait for it: I was really afraid that maybe it would be a hermaphrodite.  I was trying to figure out what I would do if it was born with two kinds of genitals.  Would I raise it as an asexual person, naming it ‘Pat” or “Chris” until it decided what it wanted to be?  Or maybe I would  just have the doctor snip something off, in the hopes that it would become whatever I had arbitrarily determined.

If it sounds like I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about this last issue, it’s because I did, I really did.  Imagine my surprise when a friend recently revealed to me her own fears for her baby when she was pregnant, only to mention that SHE had been wondering what to do if the baby was double-sexed too!  I was ecstatic to share my morbid fascination/fear with someone, which I had indulged in privately.  We had a nice, long conversation about all of the possibilities and choices regarding this issue.  Oddly enough, it was sort of freeing, and oddly fun, to finally be able to talk about it.

But I still had to decide what to do: risk the pregnancy with an amnio, just to assuage my worst fears? Or trust that things were going to turn out all right, given that the non-invasive scans and blood tests so far, had determined that the statistics pointed in my favor?