How about a brief (LOL!) intermission while I tell you nine things I learnt about pregnancy that I hadn’t hitherto known (p.s. I’m so sorry if I come across as bitter but I suppose I was at the time. Totally over it now. Ahem):
1. It will most likely occur when you’re two weeks into your hateful new job. You know, the one where you’re expected to meet the same targets on your second day that the inscrutable ice-queen to your left has been routinely exceeding for the past six years. The same inscrutable ice-queen who audibly sighs when you ask her for help when you come unstuck, despite the fact that she’s been assigned as your “buddy”. It could have been worse though. She’s easily the most approachable member of your team. Haughty indifference you can deal with, barely concealed contempt not so much.
2. Those early days of gravidity are surprisingly imperceptible to new co-workers. How is your most openly hostile colleague to know you are in “the family way” when she sniffs that she’ll be late leaving the office because she has to “go over all the new girl’s work”? Your boss doesn’t know you’re “with child” when he excludes you from the weekly team meeting on the basis that “it’ll mean nothing to you”. My advice? Treasure these days, they’ll be the best you have for a long time.
3. The so-called difficult first three months of pregnancy are by far the easiest. Don’t worry about mean-spirited fellow employees, dangerously high blood pressure (that you never knew you had) means you’ll have to leave your job within weeks. Look on the bright side, although you won’t qualify for statutory maternity pay, your blood pressure will markedly drop in the weeks following your departure from the office of misery and dread. The only way is up!
4. Prior rude health is no assurance that you’ll have a textbook nine months. It all starts off so promising. Let’s gloss over the fact that your midwife shows up half an hour late for your first consultation, reeking of smoke. Disregard that she clearly intends to recover the minutes she forfeited smoking by rushing through your meeting at breakneck speed. Does it really matter that if she was a man she’d be called Curt? What counts is that she’s stamped your file with those most heartening of words: LOW-RISK PREGNANCY. However, what all the medical professionals and guidebooks omit to tell you is that…
5. Pregnancy, for you at least, is an illness. Not at the beginning, admittedly, but as the months progress it’ll become one and quite a concerning one at that. Devouring half your body weight in spinach and kale will absolutely not stop you becoming anaemic. All the normal BMIs and negative urine tests in the world do not mean you haven’t developed gestational diabetes. You have. You’ll also have to deal with excruciating pelvic pain from annoyingly early on but, you know what, you’re not the first and you certainly won’t be the last. The most important thing of all is that the scans show your little tormentor of love is in perfect health. Everything else is irrelevant.
6. Your doctor, though delightful in every possible way, is not always right. Neither is your much slightly less genial midwife, nor the hospital consultant who prescribes paracetemol and Gaviscon as the panacea to all your ills. MILD breathlessness in pregnancy is completely normal. Even I know that. Mild, though, that’s the operative word. Shortness of breath so debilitating that moving from the sofa to the kitchen leaves you begging for an oxygen tank is not normal, and don’t let anyone try and convince you otherwise. An alphabet’s worth of letters after a name doesn’t always guarantee the right diagnosis.
7. If you want something done well, do it yourself. You’ve now reached the point where walking ten metres requires hours of prior planning. If there isn’t a team of dedicated respiratory care professionals at the halfway point, ready to administer advanced oxygen therapy, then that journey just isn’t going to happen. What about the hacking cough that builds to a ominously blood-spattered finale every single time? That’s just a scratched throat, no cause for alarm whatsoever. Those pesky pregnancy hormones! Fast forward two months of being told “it’s just the baby pushing up against your diaphragm” to 3am one especially asphyxiating Saturday morning. Precariously close to passing out from lack of oxygen, you decide, “just to be on the safe side”, to ring the Out of Hours GP. Or rather your shell-shocked partner does because you can’t draw your breath. He’s given the first available appointment at 7am. Survive the next four hours and you’ll be fine. After all, BREATHLESSNESS IN PREGNANCY IS COMPLETELY NORMAL.
8. Sorry to be repetitive but you’ve finally had verification, breathlessness in pregnancy is not normal at all. Or more precisely, yours isn’t. It’s highly abnormal actually. For the first time, yes, the FIRST time, a trained medical professional measures your oxygen saturation levels. Let me allow the trusty compendium of knowledge that is Wikipedia to put things into perspective: “Normal blood oxygen levels in humans are considered 95-100 percent…Blood oxygen levels below 80 percent may compromise organ function, such as the brain and heart, and should be promptly addressed.” Yours is 82%. A conspicuous look of unease spreads across the GP’s face. Great, you’re going to be here for hours. Five hospital beds, umpteen distressing exploratory tests and one firm diagnosis later, you’re finally discharged from hospital after thirteen days. That normal breathlessness? Oh, that was just heart failure*.
9. It’s all worth it and because you are clearly inhuman or at the very least some sort of self-flagellating masochist, you plan to go through it all again someday. Why? Well, if the next one is even one-tenth as incredible, awe-inspiring, downright cool as this one, you’d be a fool not to.
*Don’t let my somewhat trying experience scare you. The heart failure wasn’t caused by pregnancy, I’ve had it for years apparently. And despite my earlier protestations pregnancy’s not really an illness at all. Some women actually enjoy it! That’s not to say it’s any sort of leisurely stroll on the promenade. It’s not. If it wasn’t for the exigent demands it made on my body, my ailing heart would likely have laboured on unnoticed, unloved for years and that, according to my cardiologist, could have been calamitous. Think spontaneous combustion, unbidden oxidisation, that sort of thing. Okay, not really, but it could have been quite a test. So, no, I didn’t glow, I didn’t radiate beatific beams of impending motherhood, I didn’t even eat chocolate (gestational diabetes) but that’s not to say you won’t. You probably will. You definitely will. Maybe next time I will too, once I get that open heart surgery out of the way!
Not Your Average Baby 