The reason for the drama…

I suppose I should apologize for having gotten all dramatic, but I’m not going to.  It’s taken me the last couple of days to just wrap my head around the idea that a medical problem currently so minor that my doctor said he wouldn’t even treat it if I weren’t pregnant has the potential to cause really serious problems for the little one, which potential is weighty enough to provoke thousands--if not tens of thousands--of dollars worth of medical care.  It’s fairly unlikely that anything bad will happen, but that’s an incredibly intimidating thing to be facing nonetheless.

I have high blood pressure.  Very mild high blood pressure.  Blood pressure so incredibly borderline that it was normal before the last time they changed the standards.  Blood pressure so non-impressively high that my doctor had trouble making up his mind whether or not to treat me for it, even with the pregnancy, and finally decided on half the normal starting dose of labetalol, just because it made him feel better.  His words, not mine.  The funny bit is that I wouldn’t be pregnant right now if it weren’t for my slightly dysfunctional circulatory system, but that’s another story, and truly a funny one (if irony sometimes makes you laugh out loud, anyway), so remind me to tell it eventually, m’kay?

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  Anyway, for some reason my blood pressure always reads higher when it’s taken over on the obstetrical side of the house, but even so, I expected that there would be some sort of harmony between what the midwife thought of it and what my own doctor thought of it.

One of these days, I’m planning to learn about expectations and where they get you.  God, plans, laughter, you know?

So anyway, I was completely blindsided when the midwife I saw last Monday night (and whom I love, and who stayed at work very, very late answering questions for me, despite the fact that she’s pregnant, too, and had her husband waiting for her) started in with all of this high-risk stuff.  I do want to point out that she was so damned slick at slipping that information into the conversation and making it seem like a totally normal kind of overreacting sort of precaution that I didn’t even panic until we were halfway home.  That’s some sort of record for me, I think. She was talking to us about the AFP test when she pointed out that we’d be getting “the Cadillac of ultrasounds” anyway, if we were thinking that it might be reassuring.  Very slick.

I’m pretty sure that Jay remembers the rest of the conversation a lot better than I do.  I remember something about bad placentas, something about small babies, something about babies wanting to show up early, something about a higher chance of preeclampsia, and being totally confused as she tried to explain to me the whole thing with the ultrasound with the perinatologist, the rotation between the midwives and OB, how the primary care guy would be fitting in there...blood pressure monitoring, more ultrasounds, more visits with the perinatologist, some sort of fetal monitoring, monitoring for preeclampsia down the line, the possibility that the baby might not be able to tolerate labor...I feel like I need a medical degree to get a handle on it.

I know that I should be very, very grateful for all of this monitoring and all of this technology.  Because of those good things, the chances that the wee one will suffer from the slightly toxic environment my body apparently is are pretty damned small, and if problems do develop, they’ll be spotted pretty damned quick.  But oh my God, this all scares the beejeebus out of me anyway. 

I don’t do drama well in the first place, and this is my baby we’re talking about here.  The same sweet little baby who was kicking the heck out of me the other night when I came home from this appointment and cried and cried and cried.  The little alien was probably just pissed that I was crying, but I prefer to believe that all of that kicking was alien-speak for, “calm down, mommy, I’m ok.”

Since I just made myself cry writing that, I’m going to wrap it up for the evening.  More to come, including the inevitable post about how saying “more to come” makes me miss Johnny Carson.

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