I sit here, at 6 o'clock in the morning on my vacation day, having just woken from my third bad dream about this pregnancy. Each time I faced a genetic test this pregnancy I dreamt of the worst outcomes prior to testing.
At the first trimester ultrasound - the nuchal translucency screen, I dreamt of a Downs baby. The night before my 16 week screening for open neural tube defects I dreamt of a baby with Spina Bifida. And now, in two days, I face a routine ultrasound, a follow up from my 20 week fetal anatomy screen, where they didn't get perfect views of the heart due to the baby's position - and I dreamt of heart defects. Dreams have that way of feeling so real. In my dream, I saw a doctor I work with, she told me the bad news, the baby would die after birth, if by birth, it hadn't already succumbed in utero. And I looked for Lucas to tell him the bad news. And I cursed myself for having used social media to announce our pregnancy just days before.
What most likely prompted the dream was the fact that I just announced the pregnancy on facebook yesterday. It was a decision I had been pondering for a while - when to tell the world we're pregnant. The job I do as a midwife in a high risk urban hospital has made me approach this pregnancy in a way that is different both from my friends that are not in the medical field and from other midwives. Most women and midwives should approach each pregnancy and birth as if it is normal - until it is not. And although I do believe this pregnancy is normal, I not only know all the things that can go bad, I see them at work. All the time. It's made it harder to share about this pregnancy with the knowledge that it could end badly at any time.
This knowledge, this experience with bad outcomes, has made me a bit of a problem for relatives in relation to the pregnancy. I have all these ideas about how I want this pregnancy to go. About when it is appropriate to give gifts for the baby, about whether I have a baby shower or not, about names and where to birth and who to tell and when. But pregnancy, and my life, doesn't exist in a vacuum, where all conditions can be controlled. Other people are experiencing this pregnancy too. And they're allowed to react to the pregnancy in their own ways, ways that are different from how I would react, or how I would want them to react. In part, that's the beauty of life. We can't exist alone, even if we wanted to. We must accommodate others, try to understand their desires, feed off of their excitement.
At the very least, it's good preparation for the complete lack of control I'll have once the baby arrives.
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