I was never someone who sought medical advice regularly until my pregnancies. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage very early, and when I called the OB, he told me to come down to the office at the end of the day. He gave me a Xanax, and performed a D and C in the office. Terrifying. I didn’t advocate for myself, ask any questions, or really feel supported although my doctor, his nurse, and my then-husband were there. I went on to have four healthy pregnancies, and carried all four to term and then some. I was twenty five when I delivered my first baby, and although we had been through the ‘birthing class’, I was not prepared for a day long labor. A nice supportive nurse was on hand to tell me how great I was doing, and dissuaded me from taking ye olde epidural. “There’s a lot of risk,” she said. Okay, but how about the risk of a forceps delivery, which is what I ended up having with local anesthetic. A healthy baby boy.
His sister was set for her arrival almost two years later, and this time I chose the epidural. It worked, and I relaxed, I was told the doc had gone down to deliver someone else, and would be back shortly for me as it was just about time to push. Then it immediately became time to push, and I had to slap myself into reality when the nurse came in and said the baby’s heart rate dropped and we’d have to go ahead and deliver.
Two years and two days later, another brother was delivered by the same doctor, who I believe remembered the previous delivery of mine, and decided to go light on the epidural this time. He laughed a hearty, “Wow! This is a big baby!” when he caught my 9 pound, 13 ounce son.
August of 1996 I delivered my last baby girl with my nurse neighbor at my side, and an intrathecal anesthetic instead of epidural. It was a slow night on the ward, so students were invited in, and I got what we might casually say as ‘tore up from the floor up’. Whoever was doing the suturing made the observation, “Well, it might not have been as bad if you hadn’t had an episiotomy before.”
Fast forward through the children’s years of medical events:
Bouts of sharing strep throat through the family over and over
Croup in the winter
Watching my two year old held in an archaic wooden vice to get a chest x ray when he had pneumonia.
Outer ear infection that turned into mastoiditis, narrowly escaping surgery, but moreover, meningitis.
All in all, we were a healthy bunch, but those big events were unnerving, and some required hospitalizations. I think those times send a body into a state of default vigilance. I’m the caregiver, but I have to turn the case over to you because I can’t figure it all out. But so many questions! SO much uncertainty, such a powerless, lost feeling.
Once the children were grown, I had my own share of challenges. FIRST, my new husband had a sudden cardiac arrest after he pulled the car off the road and died for ten minutes. Machines, tests, procedures, lights, bells, IV’s, medications. CCU, Telemetry, Home. The same feeling as coming home with a newborn, which I ostensibly was. I sat him in his recliner-crib, and hoped he would continue to recover well, and he did.
Menopause entered gently, but introduced me to shingles, Bell’s Palsy, tendinitis, psoriasis, and the occasional outburst of mouth ulcers. Our PCP prior to all this developed trigeminal neuralgia from a procedure, and went on disability. I sought out others, but found no practitioner could hear me saying, “I think all these things are related- at least I think they’re related to menopause, and also to each other.” I tried three to four providers before I gave up, and started seeing an acupuncturist, who moved away and left me with my new acupuncturist.
A brief history of encounters in medicine. Not all encounters are listed, and for the most part my family and I have been healthy, but even in these few examples, my humanness was tested and troubled, torn and repaired, treated and released. I feel lucky to be a catalyst to potential bridges in healing for my children, myself, my husband, and my one remaining parent.