During my pregnancy with the lowercase, we moved from the NYC suburbs to the western part of the state. Shortly after moving here full-time, I walked into the bathroom to discover my pants had become a grisly blood soaked mess.
I called my perinatologist's on-call number and quietly scrubbed my pants while waiting. I still don't know what possessed me to remove every last vestige of blood rather than leaving for the hospital immediately, but I just knew that if I really was having my fourth miscarriage I could not come home to that sight.
When the doctor called me back, it was a 3rd year resident from labor and delivery. We were new in town and hadn't yet found the hospital -- the place we were frantic to get to and learn our fate. She couldn't tell us. She drove there every day but didn't know how to get there, couldn't even say how she herself had gotten there. She didn't know road names or even the names of landmarks to give us any type of guidance. Mr. W yelled at her in a way that I don't think I've ever heard him do.
She met us in the ER that night. She apologized for not knowing, told us that she really was all of the things my husband had called her in his anger...that she had called her husband in the lull between our call and our arrival and told him what had been said and that Mr. W was right about her. She did an ultrasound that night and the baby was fine, the bleeding was already slowing. Everything looked good. I was put on precautionary bed rest, told to call the peri the following day.
We saw her several more times throughout the pregnancy on late night trips to labor and delivery (and, oh, there were many of those!). She did a rotation through our perinatologists' office and saw us there. We developed a bond in that time. When my son was born, I stopped at L&D on my way to the NICU to tell her about him and show her pictures. We wrote a letter to her one day while sitting in NICU and dropped it at the triage desk in L&D -- we apologized for the anger at our first meeting and thanked her for always being concerned, for always making sure she was the doctor who saw us if we were in the hospital for any reason.
And then we didn't see her for some time. I went to a GYN that was recommended to me by the lactation consultant I saw while trying to make nursing work with the lowercase. And while the woman was probably a wonderful doctor, I did not like her. So when the time came for my yearly exam...I just never called. And I didn't call the next year. Or this year.
A couple of times, I googled the name of the poor resident who had been there through my pregnancy only to come up empty. Until about 2 months ago. I found her. She had decided to stay in our town after her residency was over. She was practicing with a gynecology office based in the local university hospital. And she was accepting new patients.
I had my appointment on Friday. While I was checking in with the receptionist, she was smiling and waving at me. As soon as she came into the exam room, she washed her hands and hugged me. She told me that she was so excited when she saw my name on her schedule...that she had called her husband to tell him that a patient she had once seen had requested to see her again. She told me that my husband and I were the patients that changed her professionally -- the ones, apparently, who reaffirmed for her that she is doing the right thing and made her better. Just...wow. And she is wonderful.
She is researching my UU, and wanted me to know that the average gestation according to the most recent studies she has seen is 28-35 weeks. That she wants to make sure that we have everything lined up if I should decide to do it myself. To that end, she is consulting with the local fertility clinic and my former perinatologists -- all of whom are based out of the same hospital and therefore have access to all of my files in the computer system. She also told me that she has a relative who is a 2 time surrogate -- once for a singleton, once for twins.
We'll get some more answers based on both the research and my body. I highly doubt that the answers will be anything other than to do a surrogacy -- my doctor seemed to think that would be the safest and best idea for all of us, but we'll take this step, see where this leads. For the first time since things fell apart with the surrogate we were talking to all summer, I really feel like we're moving in the right direction. It's no longer just us against this -- we've got someone in the hospital on our side. And I just couldn't be happier.
