This Post is About Babies (well, just the one)

This doesn't have much to do with our DO school journey, but it's a story of our family while in med school.  I'm very hesitant about posting this; you may not be interested (you can skip it), but I know that I've scoured the internet for real-person stories for months, and I wish I'd had some true stories and perspectives to relate to along the way.  Maybe someone will find this and it will help them.  I hope so.

Once upon a time we decided to try to have kids.  James was a little more excited about it than I was, but since we knew that it usually takes a woman a few months to ovulate again after stopping birth control, we figured I'd have a while to get used to wanting a baby before it was real.  So off the pill I came.  Against all of my personal expectations, we got pregnant immediately.  We were in Knoxville celebrating James's birthday early and I suddenly felt like I had slammed into a wall of exhaustion, so we headed home.  I joked that it was probably because I was pregnant.  The pill messes with your menstrual cycle when you come off of it, so I didn't know if I'd missed a period yet or not.

I happened to have a cheap little pregnancy test on hand (who knows why), so the next morning I checked.  Next to the control line was a little faint something on the "pregnant" line.  I spent the day googling pregnancy tests, since when you're unemployed and have no car, what else is there to do in these situations?  It turns out that any "something" line is a line, and a line equals HCG which equals pregnant.  It did not happen from my residual birth control pill hormones.  Still unsure, I bought another (better) test, and waited a couple of days to take it again.  This time both lines showed up very, very fast.

"JAMES!!" James, who was studying and didn't know what I was doing, came cautiously to the bathroom. "What is THIS, James!? You said it'd take a couple of months..."  And he snapped this picture.  Smile!  (Oh, and happy birthday, James!)

I have to be honest here and say that the pregnancy itself really has been very mild.  I don't throw up anyway, and some queasiness didn't change that.  Being tired isn't really that bad; I wasn't bedridden or anything.  I didn't show until 20 weeks; around the time I started to feel it.  I've never experienced heartburn before in my life (that I know of; reading the symptoms makes me pretty sure about that) and I still haven't with this.  Crying at random things is actually funny (at least for James).  Back pain isn't awesome, but luckily my husband's semester in his OPP manipulations lab is learning how to treat back pain.  Most of the time I forgot about it.  People must hate me.  I thought we might struggle with infertility, or with poor health.  I am so blessed to not have had those complications that so many others have to fight.  It was so mild that I kept wanting proof - what if I made it up?  What if it stopped being there? What if it was an elaborate hoax with a crazy uterus and fake ultrasounds?

The part about our journey that was hard was insurance and healthcare.  We moved to TN in July, and applied through the proper channels the day we arrived.  There were several mix-ups, and this led to delays and inquiries about delays, so I didn't get insurance until late November.  There were more mix-ups in December leading to our Great January Tennessee Insurance Fiasco, and we just finally got insurance again in early February.  Each delay or mix-up resulted in long daily phone calls on my part to get coverage.  Hormonal, ugly-cry type phone calls.  It's been a nightmare.

So there we were, about 7 weeks along, when there was some bleeding.  This is still in the "it's common to miscarry now" stage, so we didn't know what to do.  Do miscarriages need help?  Will I bleed to death?  We had no insurance.  The doctor's office said that it would cost about $800 out of pocket to do an OB visit, and we didn't have that money.  We're living on student loans, after all.  Eventually, the fear of the situation (for both my sake and baby's) drove us to see if the doctor could maybe just talk to us for under $200.  The doctor was fantastic.  He heard about our insurance situation and did a very, very quick  superficial ultrasound to make sure there was a living fetus and that I was a living mother, etc. etc., and that's all he could do, and he didn't charge us a cent.  But the office wouldn't let us come back until we had insurance, so the first time I had an actual real doctor visit was at 16 weeks.  Then more insurance trouble hit and I couldn't see a doctor again until 27 weeks.  (And now it's a different doctor because of - oh yes, insurance.)  I had no idea what the results were from all the tests and the big ultrasound they sent me for before at 16 weeks.  None. I felt it, so I assumed it was alive, and I hadn't died yet, so that's good.  But I have a family history of preeclampsia and my pulse has been crazy and what if I was on the back swing of kicking the bucket?

People can be nasty about things.  I tried calling all sorts of doctors, insurance representatives, and offices, and mostly I just got berated: "Why haven't you seen a doctor yet?  You really should have.  I can't believe you haven't tried to see a doctor yet.  Oh yes, our doctor won't see you."  That made me feel pretty awful.  People stopped believing my medical history, because if I was this irresponsible of a mother, surely I was lying about smoking/drinking/drugs.  Then there was the refreshing insurance operator man who suggested: "Just wait until you go into labor and then go to the emergency room.  They can't deny you healthcare then."  Oh, okay.  No prenatal care at all, then?  Never mind the bill for this ER visit.  Never mind that the last I heard, I had placenta previa which can be pretty darn severe if it is present at birth and and nobody knows about it.  Never mind that the emergency room he directed me to is at a hospital where they don't deliver babies, so they would have shipped me off to another one which defeats the purpose because of INSURANCE!  I felt so defeated and scared.  I was a horrible mother and both my baby and I would die because of something I couldn't fix or afford to go around.

Finally, finally, we just got insurance set up.  I got my card in the mail today.  Finally, I saw a doctor (actually, a midwife who works with a doctor.  Cool!).  Finally, someone else can look at my high pulse and tell us when to worry and how to deal with it.  No more internet forums with people telling me to just see a doctor.  Finally someone can tell me that the placenta previa is gone and that I don't have gestational diabetes.  Finally James knows his wife isn't on the brink of keeling over, and he knows that our current poverty hasn't killed our child.  Finally I can enjoy feeling it kick without also feeling anxiety. Finally I'm starting to believe it isn't a hoax and that it might not kill me after all.

Oh, and finally at 29 weeks there's an unmistakable half-globe stuck under my shirt.  And it's going to be okay!

Semester Two (so far)

James is now safely two tests into his second semester.  He's past that "I wonder if I can even do this" stage and into the "Well, I did it once.  I hope that's true again."

As we've lived here, James's school mascot has really grown on him.

Once James went to a basketball game with a group of med students to provide the fans with free blood pressure screening.  Presumably this cuts down on the number of fans getting too upset.  ("I'm sorry, sir, but if you don't calm down, we're going to have to check your blood pressure.")  At this game, James got his first glimpse of the school's mascot: Abraham Lincoln.  If you've never seen a giant plush Lincoln do the hokey pokey, then you're probably like me.  It's the best part of the game, though, says James.  There appears to be a speaker in the top of the mascot's hat, but James is hoping he can get it fitted for a mini t-shirt cannon so Abe can shoot stuff to his fans.

Abe aside, this semester seems nicer than last semester: James isn't taking anatomy, so he has a lighter load in terms of lab hours.  His other classes are more detailed and require more memorization than before, but now he has a little more time in the afternoons to do studying and keep up with them.  My favorite thing about this semester so far is learning about all the diseases. The best part of my day is asking James what he learned that day, and hearing about what the Plague was/is: why it was and remains so deadly, where it still happens in the US (watch out, Southeasterners who like playing with wild prairie dogs and their fleas!), how you treat it, how you test for it, how it kills you, and how many species of it there are.  The day he learned about leprosy was fascinating.  I've always been interested by this, and it's fun to hear it but not have to recall it.  I'm living in the best of both worlds!  (Also stay away from ticks.  They carry nasty stuff and I can think of no circumstances wherein they would be a positive, life-promoting human lover.)

As for me, my semester teaching has been lovely so far.  I forgot how much I loved it.  I'm teaching Intro to Biology, Human Ecology, and also Anatomy/Physiology 1 with its lab.  Anatomy/Physiology was new; the teacher who was supposed to teach two sections of it got a long-term sickness, so a week into school the administration asked me to teach it.  I was unhappy about this at first, since it almost doubled my work-time and the number of credits I was teaching.  Part of the point of the semester was to have less time on my feet as I got bigger.  It's grown on me, though. Because it's just a community college, the lab does not involve cadavers, but rather has skeletons and plastic models in addition to computer animations.  I wasn't ready to be in charge of a cadaver lab with my super sniffer nose, and boy did I luck out!  Another great thing about the class is the caliber of student.  Many of my other students (but by no means all of them) are there to fulfill a requirement and are pretty half-hearted about life.  Intro to Biology is not an easy course, and when they hit a hard conceptual thing like photosynthesis or meiosis, I can see some of them retreating inside their heads rather than try.  Attendance is so-so.  Basic abilities, like subtracting 2.5 points from a quiz total of 10 (clearly they earned an 8.5, right?  Or maybe a 6.5?) or successfully typing the date on a paper (Feb 1rst? Right?) are a bit tough. We're figuring each other out, though, and I think we're starting to have more fun in those classes.  It helps that we're through the "what is an atom?" (most of them have never taken chemistry in their life; that's why they're enrolled in biology, dang it!) and the photosynthesis lessons and are into something easier to picture.  I still love teaching, and I enjoy the challenge of these courses and classes, and I'm loving it.

But in my anatomy class, almost every student is there because they want to be some sort of medical-professional in the future that will require not only the class but a good grade in the class.  They all show up on time!  They participate!  They color their little hearts out in their anatomy coloring book.  One of them even has a child who made her use sticky notes to censor the male parts of her coloring book.  It's great.

I think this semester holds great promise for the two of us.

Note: I was just informed, while writing this, that Jim Henson (he of the Muppets) died of Toxic Shock Syndrome.  Another fun fact from the James Med School Collection!