My friend Hannah from Hodgepodge and Strawberries recently said to me that ‘pregnancy is like 9 months of non-stop PMS’ and I thoroughly agree. Life is hard enough on general principle, but when you’re trying to do it while surfing on a wave of irritation and overreaction it becomes just that much more difficult to navigate.
Picture trying to hold sixteen different items in your arms at once, while sobbing.
I have become a ball of horrible crippling anxiety and tears.
On top of the two jobs not to mention the “gee I haven’t bought any presents and now there’s no time to mail them back to Nova Scotia in time for Christmas” stress, I’ve been trying to deal with my medical situation.
So, you won’t have forgotten the mysterious disease of May/June. Well, a month or more ago I went back to the specialist because the itchy rash kept coming back. It usually starts on my chest and neck, burning and red, and then fades away while the itchiness spreads over my whole body and causes me to scratch my skin off for days. Antihistamines don’t help. Cortisone cream doesn’t help. So I went back to the internist. I was thinking that maybe this thing was autoimmune after all.
The internist listened carefully, and narrowed her eyes. “I think you should go back to the opthamologist and see if your optic nerve swelling is back,” she said. “If it is, we should probably do a lumber puncture, and you might need to talk to a neurosurgeon.”
I’m sorry, what now?
Yeah, it turns out that itching which isn’t soothed by cortisone or antihistamines can sometimes be NEUROLOGICAL.
I hadn’t mentioned it to her, but the wooshing noise in my left ear had returned a few times, too.
So I went back to the opthamologist, having spent the last three days at work saying “I MIGHT NEED A BRAIN SURGEON” whenever someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer.
The opthamologist looked in my eyes and said, “Yeah, the swelling is back again. Not nearly as bad as the first time I saw you, but definitely worse than the last time I saw you.”
Then, when I went in to my family doctor, she said that the bloodwork that the internist had done showed that my CRP (inflammation) values were up again, too.
So… what does this mean? Lumbar puncture? BRAIN SURGEON (FUCKING BRAIN SURGEON OH MY GOD)?
Well, I don’t know! Because NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW.
I called the internist’s office on Monday and was like “Uh, what do I do now?”
And they said “We don’t know… doesn’t say in your file… we’ll ask the doctor tomorrow.”
Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t heard back. So I called and left ANOTHER message asking what the hell I do now.
And that ain’t all.
The internist also apologetically told me that I should be considered a high risk pregnancy because they have no idea what’s wrong with me. Better safe than sorry.
That means that I need an OB, not a midwife.
I decided the last time I was pregnant that I wanted a midwife this time around. Midwives are covered in British Columbia, and you can still have a hospital birth and epidural and all that wonderful stuff. The big benefit to a midwife, as I saw it, was that she will come to your house and check your dilation so you don’t need to go back and forth to the hospital UMPTEEN TIMES and wait for two hours just to be told that you haven’t dilated in the slightest EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE BEEN HAVING CONTRACTIONS EVERY 3 MINUTES FOR THE LAST 18 HOURS.
Not that that wasn’t wonderful and all.
Besides, it sucked that I saw one or two doctors throughout my prenatal care and then my baby ended up being delivered by a stranger who didn’t even remember me when I went in for my 6 week post delivery checkup.
So I got a midwife for my last pregnancy and had all of one appointment with her before the baby died in the womb and all that stuff happened.
This time I held off for a while – partly because I was half-convinced that the baby would die again so I didn’t want to jump the gun and partly because my doctor was like “let’s make sure your weird disease doesn’t cause any problems.”
So I’ve been seeing my family doctor for prenatals which she said she could do through 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Then the rashes and the head wooshing started and now the internist has officially said that I should be considered high risk.
Which means that I need to have an OB.
Which sucks.
So I asked my family doctor to refer me to my previous OB clinic. After all, if I have to have an OB again, it might as well be the place that gave me a healthy baby last time, somewhere I am familiar with and with some faces that I’ll recognize.
Does that seem too much to ask? DOES IT?
APPARENTLY IT IS.
If By Yes 