41w2d: Progress

The difference between 39w6d and 40w was that at 39 weeks, I was thinking “I certainly haven’t reached the stage at which I am so uncomfortable that I want labor to start.” I had aches and pains and I hadn’t slept through the night in months, but I felt generally perky. I could still dance a little. Then, right at 40w, the baby dropped and my pelvis was sore and it hurt to walk. My husband and friends thought my waddle was cute. I thought, “maybe it would be better to just have this kid–but not over the weekend. Wait till Monday so I can have my own doctor deliver the baby.” I went to the dance that Sunday and managed to walk through the figures on the slow dances (the fact that everyone else there was exhausted from an afternoon performance made it easier for me to keep up).

The difference between 40w and 41w2d is that I’m timing contractions and thinking, “this had better not last until Monday” and “it’s good to know that all my anxiety after yesterday’s appointment when the doctor started talking about scheduling induction was most likely completely wasted.”

For the record, they said everything was fine on the biophysical profile yesterday. I saw the fetus doing his practice breathing, which was unexpected. Also, in my opinion, despite the fake breathing the fetus looks less human on ultrasound at 41 weeks than at 28 weeks, because you don’t get a view of the whole body at once. (Maybe I should pass along this insight to the legislators who want to mandate ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.)

I am keeping this-my favorite part of Finslippy’s birth story- in mind:

You know this part if you’ve had a baby already: everything you read, every doctor you speak to, every hospital orientation you attend, every labor preparation course you take, they all tell you the same thing: don’t go to the hospital right away. We won’t admit you until you’re four centimeters dilated! they say. You’ll probably panic at those first contractions and think you need to go to the hospital! But you won’t! Stay at home and be comfortable and don’t bother the hospital until you’re absolutely certain! Maybe then you can come. Maybe. But until then we don’t want you. So don’t go to the hospital! Did you hear us? Were you listening carefully, when we said the part about waiting? Please sign this form that tells us you understood that part, because Jesus we don’t want you. Until, you know, such time as you’re truly, absolutely ready. But at that point when you think you should come, it will probably be even a few hours later than that. P.S.: Don’t come here.

In her case, it was bad advice, of course…

Meanwhile, I told Mr. Luo that due to popular demand (ahem, Jody and Thalya), he needed to produce his alternate birth story for this blog. For inspiration, he is currently rereading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cordelia’s Honor. Because it is hard to top assasination attempts, civil war, fire, decapitations and infanticidal (feticidal?) fathers-in-law for an exciting gestation.

It turns out that sitting in my office chair is the least comfortable position for me right now, so I’ll sign off.

Random Bullets of Expected Date of Delivery

• 40w2d
• As of yesterday, 1-2 cm dilated. Not that that means anything, according to assorted books and childbirth educators. Well, I take it to mean things are happening, but that there are no guarantees as to when other things will happen.
• In other words, I did not call my mother to say it was time to hop on a plane.
• Biophysical profile scheduled for next week.
• My pelvis is so sore that I can barely walk, but I can still do yoga. This seems odd to me, but supports the idea that yoga postures might help during labor.
• I am a little bit proud of myself for still being able to attend yoga classs at 40w, even though I know I’m supposed to let go of the ego for yoga. Back when I was in my first trimester, I was amazed at the women in the class who were past their due dates.
• Yesterday, I was so uncomfortable that I was desperate to get to yoga class and feel better.
• In my more superficial moments in the past, I wanted to get pregnant just so that I could take the prenatal yoga class that met after the regular class I was taking, with the same teacher.
• That yoga teacher was the first person I told I was pregnant from the category of people who did not know about the ivf.
• Goal for tonight: finish packing my hospital bags.
• Towards that end, I bought a nursing bra today.
• Various packing lists I consulted said to take 1-3 nursing bras to the hospital. The maternity store where we took a class on breastfeeding recommends waiting a couple of weeks after birth to get a nursing bra, so that the engorgement will be past and sizing will be more accurate. The specialty lingerie store where I bought new bras a couple of months ago said to come back closer to my due date and they would guess my size for a nursing bra. I suspect they may have overestimated how much my band size will go down, because it’s a long time since I wore that size.
• Other chore accomplished today: took a carload of paper, magazines, cardboard, etc. to the recycling center, and a bag of stuff to Goodwill.
• Our office, specifically my side of it, is still a mess. (Mr. Luo’s stuff is a mess too, but although that bothers me, it does not really affect my productivity.)
• Favorite thing I have read so far in the American Academy of Pediatricians’ Your Baby’s First Year: “Unless the temperature is hot (over 75 degrees Farenheit [23.88 Celsius]), your newborn will need several layers of clothing to keep her warm.” 75 degrees is hot? I have been feeling guilty for using the air conditioner, and for turning it down to 75 at night. I am fairly sure that we will not need the bunting and multiple blankets I’ve seen recommended for getting the baby home from the hospital. According to my local friends, a onesie is just fine.
• Least favorite thing from that book: something about using an extra rinse cycle for washing the baby’s clothes. I have done an inordinate amount of laundry recently, in part because I washed all the baby clothes we have been given, and now they tell me I did it wrong. No, I’m not going to re-wash the clothes, and yes, I do know there will be a lot more laundry soon.
• We have not bought a single item of clothing for the kid, but it is possible that he has more clothes than I do, and that they are better matching. Blue, blue, blue, blue, white, blue, blue, green, blue blue blue, red, khaki. It’s a good thing blue is one of my favorite colors.
• It looks like the doula will most likely be able to drive us to the hospital when the time comes, so that is one worry out of the way. I’m not sure why the idea of taking a taxi did not seem like a great solution, except that I worry about relying on taxis when not in a major metropolitan area where you can just step outside and hail one if the one you ordered doesn’t show up.

40w1d

Still here, still pregnant.

But enough about me (or rather, I’ll update if anything interesting comes up at my doctor’s appointment later today).

My little sister is getting married! Soon.

So, just how feasible is it to travel half-way across the country by air with a 10-12 week old baby?

I already missed my little brother’s wedding when I was in the middle of my first ivf cycle on the other side of the country. I’d like to make this wedding, and since I won’t be teaching in the fall, the fact that it is scheduled for the weekend after classes start should be less of a problem (can I hope that the Dean will have more urgent things to do than hold meetings that week for the project I’m supposed to work on?)

These are my younger half-siblings. I remember when they were born (one of them was four weeks postdate, yikes). I barely know my older half-siblings, but am relatively close to the younger ones, having spent every-other-weekend-and-a-month-in-the-summer with them in junior high and most of high school. Living in the same state helped too, as did knowing of their existence from the beginning. (And now I’ll probably end up deleting this post on the basis of containing excessive personally identifying information.)

Plans

At this point, I vacillate between thinking every abdominal twinge is the beginning of labor and feeling like it is clear that the baby will not come before 42 weeks.

We finally hired a doula. Apparently, it is normal to do this before one reaches 39 weeks, but I think that perhaps our delay is not just a procrastination issue. We needed time to think about what our priorities were for the birth. The obvious answer is “healthy mother, healthy baby,” but there is a bit of leeway in how that is defined and how you get there (which should be obvious, but based on some comment threads I have read is not).

Anyway, for us it worked out that we had written a draft of a birth plan before meeting the doula, rather than having her help us come up with one. (So far, the main benefit of the birth plan was making it easier to talk to the doctor about my concerns. Instead of me having to both remember and ask my questions, my husband, whose assigned role at that appointment was to help me get my questions asked, said “we wrote a birth plan, here it is, what do you think?” and the doctor read it and said it all was fine with him.)

Monday was our second appointment with the doula. We talked a bit about induction and alternatives to Pitocin. All the standard things I’ve heard, plus some I hadn’t.

I had already been thinking that I would probably just prefer to wait it out, hope that labor started before 42 weeks (actually 42w2d, due to my doctor’s staff having calculated my EDD at 6/1 instead of 5/30), and deal with the Pitocin if I had to at that point. A post of DoctorMama’s gave me some support for this approach.

I realized while talking to the doula that my issue is not so much any kind of reasoned skepticism about natural induction strategies, but that my attitude towards alternative medicine has been profoundly affected by my experiences with providers. I’ve had my ups and downs with allopathic health care providers, but my worst health care experience ever was with a doctor of Chinese medicine in Old Colony, and I also had a bad experience with an accupuncturist in Neighboring Country. I know there are plenty of capable and ethical practicioners of alternative medicine, and bad practicioners of standard medicine, but these are my experiences, and in the absence of strong evidence that I need to use a particular alternative therapy, I think it is a good idea to honor my feelings about this. I think this is equivalent to a woman who wants a home birth, not because studies show it is safe or because there are fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria at home, but because hospitals freak her out. As long as it is a fact that homebirths have good outcomes, why shouldn’t she avoid the anxiety of a hospital birth? In my case, that means that when it comes to self-induction: eating spicy food, fine, I like spicy food. Anything to do with yoga is fine by me, as long as it’s not one of the poses that I just can’t do. Nipple stimulation, depends on how painful it is. Homeopathic tablets, accupuncture, evening primrose oil: I’ll pass.

Of course, since I started this post yesterday, I’ve changed my mind again and have begun to believe that labor will start sooner rather than later.

Narrative Conventions

I:

LL: Did you just throw a book across the room?

MrL: Yes, when I got to the phrase “pure life force.”

LL: Wait, how can somebody who owns videos of the original Star Wars Trilogy object to the “force”?

MrL: You know, there is a difference between fantasy and nonfiction.

II:

MrL: The problem with the childbirth books is that I can’t get into the birth stories. They need more excitement, like some explosions, people running through the hallways….

LL: What? You want an ER birthstory, maybe with helicopters falling people? Anyway, you do realize that to a pregnant woman, something like the phrase “50 hours of back labor” is rather scary, even though it may lack narrative structure?

Mr.L: …I know, there’s a bomb about to go off, and the husband has to hack into the computer code to stop it and save the day….

LL: Weren’t you the one making a big deal about fact and fiction?

These dialogs have been altered to disguise the fact that it really takes me hours if not days to come up with snappy responses.

Mr. Luo has already written with a draft of a we-had-our-baby email with an exciting birth story that seems to include one of those scenes of the baby popping out with the umbilical cord acting like a bungie cord. Also something about his plans to raise the kid to be an Evil Overlord type, but the kind who doesn’t make dumb EO mistakes. I am reconsidering the idea of giving him the password to this blog to post the news when the baby arrives.

Famous Last Words

“We have two Ph.D.’s between us, and one of us is an engineer. We can certainly install a carseat.”

Not to mention that one of us is a compulsive reader of instruction manuals, and therefore read both the Britax and the Toyota manual. And called both companies to confirm the best position (center with belt vs. side with LATCh). And read a bunch of Estelle’s car seat posts.

And that the one who does not normally read instruction manuals made an exception in this case, a fact which has been filed under “expecting a baby is making him do weird things too!”

Result: We went to a carseat inspection clinic Thursday. We got the installation basically right, except for the tether, which Britax no longer recommends attaching overhead for rear facing (mainly because it’s a pain in the neck to get the kid into the seat that way, apparently). I will note that it did take two of the certified child passenger safety seat inspectors to get the seat re-installed tightly enough (with less than an inch of movement).

So Lazy I Forgot the Title the First Time Around

39w0d. Still pregnant, no baby in sight.

Some links.

Dooce on Ikea. We also have a newish Ikea, but I haven’t been there, because it is 45 minutes to an hour away from me, depending on traffic (well, if I timed it particularly poorly, I could easily spend a couple of hours to get there on the Death-trap Interstate) and I am afraid of spending too much money. Also, this way I can continue to tell people that I have only been to two Ikea stores in my life, one in Hong Kong and one in Edinburgh. The Container Store is closer, but not too close. Having just spent $230 there last Saturday, I think I’m glad it is not on my side of the city.

Dean Dad and Dr. Crazy on blogging ethics, developing a blogging voice, writing about students, and the apparently eternal desire to police other people’s blogs. I’m just doing links, because I am too tired to write coherently just now about my thoughts on this. I will say that I think Dr. Crazy’s post and her comments at Dean Dad’s blog add important thoughts to the discussion. I do think there is a difference between complaining over the copier and complaining on a blog, because audience of a blog is more likely to include students (which doesn’t mean we should never write about students, but as Dr. Crazy says, we need to remember that blogs are public).

In fact, it reminded me of recent posts at Life and Times of a Labor Nurse. She had written about a patient who was rather pushy and also inconsiderate of other patients. Brooklyn Girl commented on her own experience at her first birth, and even though the Labor Nurse pointed out that the situation was different, in that Brooklyn Girl had had good reason to be assertive, BG wondered if somewhere a labor triage nurse had blogged about her. Life and Times seems to have gone private or been taken down, which may have something to do with another post in which she received threatening email about the ethics of writing about patients at all (she pointed out that she disguised identities in the same way that doctors do when they present case studies at conferences).

The pushy patient post brought up a lot of issues for me about medical care and self-advocacy that I have not been able to blog about. Maybe I’ll give it another try soon.

Journals, Magazines, Books

Nesting, purging, de-cluttering continues. (Although I am still a little skeptical of the term nesting. After all, Dr. Crazy is cleaning too these days.)

1.

If anyone would like a bunch of old issues of the PMLA, in good condition, let me know.

Or, if you’d prefer a bunch of old issues of Wired (”from back when it was worth reading”), plus a few newer ones, in beat-up condition, we’ve got those too.

2. After four and a half years of cohabitation, the need to make room for baby has motivated me to combine the some parts of my fiction collection (the parts that have nothing to do with my research) with my husband’s.

Our duplicates are:

The Lord of the Rings

Frankenstein

The Handmaid’s Tale

Dubliners

Prince Caspian

The Magician’s Nephew

Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons, Downtown Doonesbury, In Search of Reagan’s Brain, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, A Tad Overweight but Violet Eyes to Die For, An Especially Tricky People, As the Kid Goes for Broke, And That’s My Final Offer, Call Me When You Find America, Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy

There would be more duplicates if most of the books I owned before college had not gone missing over the years (Doonesbury collection and LOTR being salient exceptions, because I must have taken them with me to college). All the duplicates (except LOTR, to which we are too attached, and all of which are too beat up to donate anyway) are going to the local literacy group’s book sale. The magazines will most likely be recycled. I will send a note to my department’s listserv about the PMLA, but who will want a ton of paper when they can print out whatever articles they need from  J-Stor?

Pediatricians Take Note

After the search for a pediatrician got to be too stressful for me, Mr. Luo took over. I gave him the list of recommendations from my ob-gyn, which I had already cross-checked with my insurance list of providers. I’d asked a few people for personal recommendations, but they tended to be for doctors not covered by my insurance, not taking new patients, or in the practice that was too busy to even meet us. Oh, and we’d also looked at which practices were easily accessible by public transportation, for times when my husband needs to take the kid in while I’m at work. (It turns out that it is quicker to take one bus to the area full of medical offices that is near hospital A than to take two busses to the area near hospital B, even though it is closer to us.)

Mr. L. called some of doctors and set up consultations with two of them, which we did a couple of weeks ago. Both of these guys seemed fine, to the extent one can tell by talking to them. Nobody said anything stupid like “We want every child in our practice to be in the 50th percentile.”
We talked about it and both of us are comfortable with either doctor. The practices are similar: both have two doctors sharing a practice; their hours, including weekend hours, are about the same; they both send sick babies to the same hospital and so on.

We are 99% decided to go with the doctor who has the more competent staff. That is, the one that, when my husband called, scheduled a consultation. Then they sent us an informational booklet and a form for us to fill out with basic information about us (and our insurance, of course). When we went in, they had a chart set up already.

The other practice told my husband just to come in any day around noon to talk to the doctor. That could have meant they were nicely friendly and informal, but I had my doubts, which were confirmed when we went up there only to be told the doctors weren’t there that day. They gave us their informational booklet then and suggested we come back the next day.

The more I think about the two consultations, the more I favor the second doctor anyway,* but still, the biggest difference was our impression of the office staff. If the kid were already here, he’d probably vote for the office that had a castle to play on in the waiting room, but he’s stuck with our decision for now.

*I realize this is some kind of perception error. If we had decided on ped number 1, I’d be focusing on the things I preferred about him.

Due Dates

According to my doctor’s records here, my Estimated Date of Delivery is June 1. That’s not quite right. My egg retrieval was September 6, so the due date should be May 30. I didn’t argue, because I figured that a later EDD meant less pressure to induce labor if I went post-date.

I finally asked my doctor about induction. He said they induce anywhere between 39 and 42 weeks. Some women want an induction on their due date, some, like me, don’t want an induction.

By June 15, I will probably want an induction, natural childbirth be damned. (I will also be mumbling to myself “not pregnant in the summer, HA! ninety degrees counts as summer in most places, grrr. I don’t care about carbon emissions, turn down the damn thermostat!” Oh, wait. I’m already saying that.)

Back when I was deciding whether to go to my conference last month, I figured that the baby would be born either at 34-35 weeks, while I was in Neighboring Country for that conference or at 42 weeks. By my illogic, staying home from the conference would increase the chances of a 42-weeker significantly, while attending the conference meant a 34-weeker much more likely.

Our neighbor just asked us to take care of the Diva cat and the dog over Memorial Day weekend, so I figure there’s a chance the baby will come then, just because of the added complications of getting someone to take care of our cats and her pets while I’m in the hospital. As an added incentive, some of our dancing friends are giving us a shower that Sunday.

Now, I’m just trying to figure out when my mother should fly out. It would be nice to spend some time with her before the birth. She can’t stay forever, though (more’s the pity), and it would be more helpful for more of her time here to be after the baby’s born than before. Since we haven’t got a ticket yet, we’ll most likely be getting a last-minute high fare anyway, so we may end up just calling her when labor starts to say, “time to pack!”