Medical Euphamisms

The same person who decided to call it getting "fixed", "light pressure", and "a small pinch", also thought that getting "checked" was an appropriate term for the terrible invasion of my space this morning.

Surprisingly I'm more emotionally stable this morning than I anticipated being, and I didn't cry at the Dr.'s office or in the car.

Baby's head is down. We know that because Dr. Man felt it. As in: he reached up in me far enough to feel my baby's head!

In case you wondered if that is a comfortable process or not....it's not. Just go ahead and try to feel your own insides by way of your cervix. I dare you.


But here's why you never hear about how painful it is to "be checked": Because after the Dr. leaves the room the mom flops back on the table and lets out a tiny little groan. Then she starts to say "holy crap that HURT!" But she stops herself at "holy" because that's when she realizes that if she can't handle "getting checked" there is no possible way she's pushing a full grown BABY (starting with its gigantic head) out of her.

So mom shuts up and bites her tongue and starts to tell herself things like "there are more than 6 billion people wandering this planet right now, and they all got here the same way. Clearly this will not kill me."

Not this mom. This mom laid flopped back on the table uttered every word of "holy crap that HURT!" to Josh (who chuckled heartily), got dressed made her next appointment and left.

It wasn't until we were on the elevator that I realized the whole if you can't do this you'll never make it thing. And Josh told me that "it's all in my head" after which I promptly told him that "if it were all in my head my cervix wouldn't hurt so bad". And then I stepped on his toe and kicked him the shins and told him THAT was in his head. OK I didn't really kick him, or step on his toes (but only because I can't get close enough to his toes with mine without falling over...da belly gets in the way...) but I sure thought about it.

Fortunately Dr. Man is fantastic and while he's torturing me he tells me that everybody winces and whines when he does this. I'm totally normal. Oh good. Because I wasn't at all concerned about the pain, just about whether or not I was normal.

He also had the "this is labor, this is not" talk with us. Then he said we'll be doing these checks more frequently but not to worry because this baby is going to come before we can do too many of them (still at least 2-3 weeks out he's guessing). 2-3 weeks? For some reason I'm still counting in MONTHS over here!

When I told Dr. Man "everything hurts and I have to get out of the car before Josh drives over the bump at the end of the driveway so I can still walk up the stairs", he nodded knowingly (he gets a free pass to nod knowingly because he deals with whining pregnant women all day long) and said "yeah, I hate to tell you that there's nothing anybody can do about it and it's only going to get worse. A lot worse."

I tried to be positive and said "eh, nothing a month or 2 won't cure".
He put down his pen, stopped writing in the chart, his eyes got big and he looked at me and said "hopefully not a whole month!" like I was completely insane for thinking this could possibly last longer than 34 days.

I'm not sure whether to be comforted or totally freaked out by that.

As we walked out Josh asked "When did we get to this point?" and I had absolutely no response. We've been "planning" for this baby for 100 years and suddenly the 280 days of pregnancy are almost gone.