One of "Those" Children

My OBGYN is about as practical and down to earth as you can possibly get. Two months before Steve & I conceived Gracie, I had a very early miscarriage. I have a strange antibody in my blood that makes me more susceptible to early miscarriages, so the loss, while heartbreaking, was not a complete surprise. My doctor said, "you know these things happen frequently and you do have a higher risk of miscarriage than most women." No tear-filled "sorry for your loss" speeches from him. When I went to have my first ultrasound when I was six weeks pregnant with Gracie, he set me down and told me the ultrasound looked good, but not to get too excited. When I made it to the 12-week mark, I asked if it was okay to get excited. He said, "Take out a billboard ad if you want to." I had heard of doctors who released pregnant women from work 4 to 5 weeks before delivery. I anticipated that same thing from my doctor. Visions of spending the last few weeks of my pregnancy at home resting and getting the baby's room ready danced in my head. I asked, "When should I stop working?" His response: "When your contractions are five minutes apart." He looked at me like he was thinking, "Woman, you're pregnant, not sick." Throughout my pregnancy, he told it to me like it was. If I gained too much weight between visits, he told me I needed to watch what I ate. When I failed the one hour glucose test but passed the three hour glucose test, he told me that was not carte blanche to go eat all the sugar I wanted. He was very easy-going and direct. I was comfortable with that. I had my husband, my mother and my sister to baby me and pamper me. I needed my doctor to be honest and straightforward.

37 Week Surprise
So, when I was 37 weeks along and he did my first internal exam and then frowned, I knew that it wasn't going to be good news. He's not one to exaggerate problems or look for trouble when trouble's not there. "I don't think that the baby's head is in the right location. We need to do an ultrasound to check it out." So, back to the ultrasound room we went. He did the first part of the ultrasound, another clue to me that whatever was going on was not something to be taken lightly. He let the ultrasound tech finish the exam, told her to take several pictures, and told me to go to an exam room when we finished and he'd be in to talk to me. Okay, to say my blood pressure was elevated at this point would be an understatement. I met him in the exam room and he started our conversation by saying, "Well, it appears that you have one of 'those' children" - one of those who make their wills know before they even arrive. Gracie was transverse breech, head on the left side, feet on the right. I asked what that meant. He said "Babies don't come out this way." I said, "Not without a lot of trouble." He shook his head, "Not at all. If she stays this way, you'll have to have a c-section." Okay, never in 9 months had I imagined this - I knew that my hips were made for childbirth – I mean, come on, that had been my excuse for years, and no one in my family had ever had a c-section, so it never even crossed my mind. Questions filled my mind. My doctor patiently answered them. Would this be more risky for Gracie? No, it would be a little more difficult surgery for him and a little more difficult recovery for me, but Gracie & I both would be fine. Why did this happen - was something wrong? No, sometimes babies just don't turn. It can happen with a host of medical conditions but it can also happen for no medical reason at all.

We scheduled another appointment for a week and a half later to see if my stubborn baby girl had turned. She hadn't. My doctor said I had two choices: Option 1. Schedule a c-section. Option 2. Go into labor on my own and have an emergency c-section in the middle of the night. Okay, I may be slow, but I haven't totally missed the train. I quickly chose Option 1. A scheduled c-section it was. So, I have never felt a labor pain. Gracie was born an hour and fifteen minutes after we arrived at the hospital, perfect in every way. My doctor was right - she never would have come out the way she was turned. He was right that she and I both were going to be okay. He was right that sometimes these things "happen" and there's no medical reason for them. He was also right that my daughter is one of "those" children.

These days when she’s throwing herself on the ground because she doesn’t get her way or pulling with all her might to move a chair away from the table so she can “clean” it or running pell mell toward the road when we’re playing in the yard, I just have to smile to myself and remember that my doctor called it all those months ago – I have one of “those” kids. I wouldn’t have it any other way