Week 6, Day 5 (where Karl discovers she is braver than she thought possible)

Let’s be clear – I’m not exactly svelte. Voluptuous and then some would be a better description. Luckily I’m above average height (5’8”) and have large flat feet, otherwise I’d look utterly ridiculous. Hell, who am I kidding.. I probably DO look utterly ridiculous but I can’t see my butt unless I try to, so I tend not to fuss over this very much. So it’s fair to say I expected a lot of aggro from health care professionals about my weight. I mean, they’ve always been rather critical of it up til now, so why should impending motherhood cut me any slack?

The day before at Dr Kaye’s office, her nurse asked me to pop up on the scales. I’d been dreading this… In November I managed to shed about ten kilos and get down to X weight (you do not seriously think I’m going to tell you what X stands for? Get real!). However with the disruptions of December and January, I’d managed to make my clothing tight again and was fairly sure I’d regained those kilos and added a few more for good measure.

I explained this to the nurse (read: gabbled in embarrassment) and she just grinned and said “X minus one”. (Actually she said a number that equates to X minus one.. you get the idea). I thought I’d misheard her, so blinked disbelievingly at the scales. Sure enough.. X minus one. How on earth… ? I guess my home scales are way out of whack. To discover I wasn’t X plus 15 was such a wonderful surprise it put a grin on my face all day.

So there I was, the next day at Mr Richard’s floor, getting my blood pressure measured all over again, and about to meet the guy who would dictate my life for the next 7 and a bit months. He was much nicer than I expected, and laid all sorts of statistics and probabilities out for my perusal. Being a numbers gal, I felt empowered by the knowledge and options available to me. Hearing about the possible birth defects that are a higher risk for older mothers didn’t faze me (however Wayne went very quiet and a peculiar shade of peuce). I’d rather know and be forewarned, you dig?

Mr Richard assures me that my weight is much less of a concern than my age. I don’t know if I should be reassured by that statement or not. Everyone is making a really big deal about my age. Chronologically I guess I’m 41, but I have trouble believing it. I still feel about 26 inside, 31 tops! Who IS this old lady they keep fussing about?

With Mr Richard’s help we planned a strategy that would best alert us to likely problems while reducing the risk of invasive tests that might trigger a miscarriage. After all, I have a bit of a history of dropping my bundle, so let’s not up the ante unless we have to. Even half a percent increased risk is a lot when you’re as “clumsy” as I seem to be.

The plan is to have the nucal fold scan in about another month, and depending on the measurment taken then, either wait for the full-on measure-everything scan at 18 weeks, or have an amnio test at 16 weeks to ascertain if there are any chromosomal defects. If there is a problem detected at 18 weeks we can do the amnio then (if we avoided it earlier), and make a decision in time to decide on termination or otherwise by 24 weeks. Gack.. imagine getting to nearly 24 weeks then having to face termination. How can anyone’s psyche recover from that? Still and all, the option was mine to decide, and I feel comforted by the thoroughness of the plan.

Dr Richard gave me a list of midwives, and told me to let his office know when I’ve decided upon one. There’s a stumbling block; how on earth does a first time mother choose a midwife? Do you interview them, or do they interview you? All I can logically envisage at this point is looking for one who has had at least one child of her own – seems reasonable enough.

Then it was off downstairs for the (gasp!) blood test. A delightful little Asian lady who was profoundly pregnant ushered us into a room and seated me on a high reclining chair. Awesome chair.. can I have one at home please? Given what followed next I think it was only her obvious pregnancy and frailness that kept me seated and her safe.

She fluffed it. Repeatedly.

You need to understand something that was only explained to us later – this clinic has a rule; two tries and you’re out. Once the needle is withdrawn that is counted as one try. So the technician dug around in my right elbow for what seemed like an eternity while I stared everywhere but at the horror that was happening on my elbow. Dry as a bone.. she couldn’t find a vein anywhere.

She felt around the other elbow – no good there either. She then decided to try the back of my left hand. Bear in mind I once woke up with a drip in my hand after a nasty horse-riding fall, and ripped that sucker right out before I was fully awake. Such is my horror at needly things. And yet here she was, about to stick a needle in possibly the one place you can guarantee I could not possibly tolerate.

I couldn’t look at what she was doing, and I couldn’t look at Wayne either. He was wearing his Major Concern face which wasn’t helping my panic levels much. The tech dug around in the back of my hand for ages, squeezing out one tube of blood, and two tubes that were nearly empty.

Normally I’m a gusher. You strike a vein on me and you need full Hazmat gear just to change the tube (okay I’m exaggerating but you get the idea). I guess the high internal panic might have something to do with the speed the blood exits my body. That this girl could only find the merest trickle that kept drying up was a good indication she was never in the right place. But she kept trying, bless her. Apart from the time when I jumped so severely that I snapped the needle off inside me (around age 14), I had not experienced true needly horror until that moment.

She gave up in the finish and told us to go to another clinic to let them try again, as she was now eliminated due to the clinic’s rules, and there was no one else available on the premises.

My hard-won blood would now be thrown out. We’d have to start all over again. Ye Gods little apples and buckets of jellyfish, I can’t be hearing this? But I was. We were out of time to try again that day (client appointments already late for) so we decided to try again on Thursday. Somewhere else!

Later on that day my blood pressure plumeted (I think it was delayed shock) and I came very close to fainting. I worried myself sick about the baby –blood pressure drops had been one of the theories put forward for my earlier miscarriages. Were the afternoon’s efforts not only wasted, but also possibly hazardous to Tadpole? And to think.. they still needed that blood so we’d have to go through it again.

Not a lot of sleep that night…