In the week since I have managed to hit 24w (presumably, a "magic number" for pregnancy) it has slowly dawned on me:
I AM NOT READY. I AM NOT READY. I AM SCARED SHITLESS.
The realization that from here on out is the slide down the mountain--that I have 15 weeks left to go if I make it to 40w, and that 15w is approximately how long it takes to move a bag of garbage from the upstairs hallway to the downstairs living room in my house--which is to say, 15w is not that much time at all (well, unless you are a bag of garbage)--all of this whackadoodle realizing going on has me humming the theme song from Jaws under my breath.
My mother told me the other day that the reason she went past 40w with all of her children was because she "lacks a hormone to start labor." And, oh, "you might want to get that checked out...I had to have blood draws at the hospital all the time."
Heh? What was that you said Mom?
At my last OB appointment I asked my doctor about this. "Yeah, I've heard about it," she said. "We won't let you go past 40w. We don't want you to have a 12 pound baby."
A 12 pound baby is a problem, since currently Cheek Tunnel is only cleared for babies weighing up to 8 pounds, but it's not my biggest worry.
This next part is where things get serious.
My mother has two living children but carried three children past term. The middle child was my sister, a perfectly healthy baby who went past 40w. My mother tells it like this: she woke up one morning after her due date knowing it was time, feeling "weird, sick." She went to the hospital and some kind of quasi-labor started. The nurses nursed her along, and once the labor started, it really took off (she warns me about this, too: It takes a while to start...but once it does, watch out!). Her doctor wasn't available, so they gave her a spinal. (Knowing very little about medicines given while in labor, as I haven't gotten to that part yet in my WHAT TO EXPECT book, I don't know the difference between a spinal and an epidural, or if they are the same thing, or what). The spinal, my mom says, numbed her completely and she couldn't push. The doctor took his time getting to the hospital. Finally the baby was born, but she had the cord wrapped around her neck-- and had for a while. Somehow. And she had swallowed some of her own waste, too. She was blue. She failed the test they give to babies. She died a few days later. My sister, my only sister, gone because of a doctor's mistakes.
My mother tells me that nowadays she could sue, but that it didn't really occur to them back then--they were too busy with grief to sue. She has opened up about this painful time more in the past few months than she has my entire life. While I am finding these moments strangely comforting, as I know so little about my sister and her brief life, and as I could never find a way to ask about her without thinking I would only hurt my parents, it's hard not to imagine this happening to me, to Rocky, too. I've asked about my sister before only to be told not to dwell on it--after all, if she had survived, my brother would not be here. That has always stopped me cold. And now that I am finally hearing her entire story, it's keeping me up as I simultaneously worry about pre-term labor (courtesy of Stumpy, AKA The Little Cervix That Could), umbilical cords, and late labor punctuated by a silent delivery. This is, of course, 95% Pregnant Worry Normal Brain, and, as everyone tells me, they wouldn't let this happen today, but it makes my decision to have any kind of medication that dulls the slightest cramp a bit of an emotional dilemma (yeah--if you have any thoughts on epidural versus no epidural, I'd love to hear them. My mother is surprised I would go for an epidural, and now that I know what happened to her, I'm not positive I want one, but I can be a pain wuss).
Stumpy the Cervix is holding steady at slightly below normal, but I am still having biweekly ultrasounds. My doctor tells me that she will induce me at 37w if I am dilated. I am perfectly fine with that. But 37w is a mere, teensy, wee little 12 weeks away, which is just enough time for me to... paint the nursery, set up the furniture, buy, oh, EVERYTHING I need (which is, oh, EVERYTHING), get work squared away, mentally prepare myself for motherhood X 2, and throw up a few hundred trillion times from fear. If I start, ermmm, right this second. Like, two words ago. As in, get off my gained-24-lbs-at-25-weeks ass and do something besides watch that damn Matt Damon video again. Because despite the fact that I am sliding down the other side of pregnancy mountain, my heels want to dig in and suspend things right here for a bit, where I don't really need to think about much and where worry about what could happen remains, simply, about what could happen.
