Part Three

We're back. Albuquerque was nice, except for the 8% humidity, nose-bleed dryness. Oh, and Linus put my cell phone in the toilet. I don't know why, except throwing things in the toilet is apparently one of the super-funnest things ever, given how much time he spends doing it. Potty-training should be a breeze, right!?

Ok, so, to get back to the story - I didn't miscarry, and the OB had called in a prescription for progestrin. The sonogram lady gave me some pictures of what looked like a kidney bean or a peanut hanging out in my uterus, so we start referring to him/her as The Peanut. I went to the pharmacy and picked up my prescription, headed home and started doing research. I started pulling the primary literature and found a recent meta-analysis that essentially found that supplementing progesterone will not stop a woman from miscarrying, except for a few women who have a very specific inability to produce progesterone properly. Low progesterone levels are a symptom, not a cause, and the common practice of supplementing progesterone is not really necessary or recommended. Now, I'm all for modern medicine. I like that our life expectancies are in the 70s or 80s instead of the 40s, but I'm not about taking medications unnecessarily, especially while pregnant, and especially not hormones, which mess with everything. So, I tried to get hold of the OB to talk to her about it. Foolish me! It's Saturday at this point, so the best I can do is leave a message for one of the nurse-midwives and hope that someone gets back to me. Meanwhile, I take the first dose, because I'm still paranoid about miscarrying and I'm not willing to make a unilateral decision to not take the meds. I ended up lying awake that night until, seriously, 4 in the morning, obsessing about all that had happened. In the morning, I'm weepy and sleep-deprived, no one from the OBs office has called me. I decide to do some more research on the meds, so I type the name of it, "Provigil", into Google, and find out that what I've been taking is used to treat narcolepsy. What? Now I'm really confused, though being awake until 4 am makes all kinds of sense. I'm wondering if this is a dual-use drug or what? Of course, now it's Sunday, so not only is the OBs office closed, my pharmacist is off as well. Long story short(er), I've been taking the wrong med. Either the doctor's office called in the wrong thing, or the pharmacy keyed in the wrong code, I still don't know which. I'm assured by all parties involved that this Provigil will in no way harm The Peanut. Of course, what else are they going to say.

So, then I'm on the real progesterone, and it practically puts me into hibernation. Progesterone slows down your digestion and makes you sleepy, so when you're supplementing what your body is already making in early pregnancy, you become extremely sleepy! I can barely stay awake for more than a couple of hours at a time, and when I am awake, all I can think about is sleep. I met with my OB to talk to her about the whole progesterone-as-symptom-not-as-cause thing, I even photocopied a couple of papers out of journals to give to her, but she totally and completely blew me off. She wouldn't even look at the material I brought. It's at this point that I decided I need a new doctor. Still, I stayed on the progesterone for 5 weeks or so. I was sucked in by the whole better-safe-than-sorry thing. Oh, and I also developed a problem with my gall bladder, necessitating another sonogram, this time of my liver. It became "sluggish" and "full of sludge". I'm sure this was a direct result of being on the progesterone, even though my OB thought I was full of crap (she didn't say as much, but it was written all over her face, if you know what I mean). Funny how as soon as I stopped the progesterone at about 13 weeks, all my gall bladder problems went away. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, we weren't telling anybody I was pregnant. Even though the OB reassured me that everything was fine, I still had the feeling that things weren't right, and I didn't want to tell until I knew everything was ok. The exception to this was my mother. I did tell her, and she immediately flipped out and started pressuring me to tell the rest of the family (all the cousins and aunts and what-not). She just couldn't understand why I didn't want to immediately tell everyone, she was so excited. I kept telling her that I was still nervous that something would go wrong, and that I would tell everyone when I knew everything was ok. She was not happy about it. She also wanted to start buying stuff. We went 'round and 'round about it. I'm a scientist, but I was worried that would jinx things. Hey! Don't look at me that way! That's a major cognitive adaptation, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in your mind! Anyway, my mother kept harassing and I kept resisting. Finally, she told me that she "accidentally" told my aunt, and my aunt was probably going to tell my cousins, so I might as well call them up myself. I was angry, but I relented. I was about 16 weeks at this point, well past the real danger of miscarrying, and I'd just had a clean result from my quad marker test, so I was feeling more hopeful. Plus, at a certain point you just have to start telling people. I wanted to soak in the congratulations and well-wishing, to indulge in the happy fantasies. Once I started telling family, I ended up spilling the beans all over the place - coworkers, colleagues, everybody.

We'd started looking around for a midwife, asking everyone we knew, and kept getting recommendations for the same lady - Fran. By this point we had started to consider a home birth, and she was one of the few (maybe only) midwives in town that would attend a home birth. We made an appointment with her to see what she was like. She's a lay midwife, so she saw us in her house, in a bedroom she used for appointments with a comfy old bed covered in a beautiful quilt she made herself. After a couple of hours of talking, me with my list of questions, and her with over 30 years experience catching babies, Or and I walked out, gave each other a little nod, and knew we'd found our midwife. Fran is this awesome mix of absolute competence and lifetimes of experience, wrapped in a slightly hippy, grandmotherly package. While we were there I asked her if she could recommend another OB, maybe someone she worked with, because I disliked mine so much. She said, "Why do you feel you need to see an OB, what about a family practice doc?" "Um...well...you mean I don't have to see an OB?" Like there's a law or something. She recommended one of the few doctors in town who was supportive of home birth. I called and made an appointment, but I already had an appointment with the OB for the 18 week sonogram, so I decided to keep it and have that be the last time I saw her.

Next time - 4 generations and the sonogram lady.