pregnancy – Pulse

This Is Why

H. Lee Kagan May 29, 2020 3 Comments

February 2016
Tierra Nueva, Dominican Republic

I’m in the last of five days caring for patients at rural clinics in western DR, along the Haitian frontier.

Tierra Nueva, miles from anywhere, is a collection of clapboard shanties and shacks scattered along a dusty, unpaved road that dead-ends at the border. People survive here by coaxing vegetables out of the earth via scratch farming. The lucky ones have a goat and maybe some hens.

Unexpected

Christine Loftis August 2, 2019 6 Comments

Christine Loftis ~

“You’re twenty-seven-and-a-half weeks pregnant.”

As I lay on the exam table, time froze.

How can this be? I wondered dazedly. I’m a second-year medical student. I’ve just completed a course in female reproduction and endocrinology. How could I have missed the signs?

I attribute my obliviousness to the surgery I’d gone through only months before: the removal of a twenty-seven-pound, mucus-filled ovarian cyst. My lack of menstrual periods

Ode to the Uterus

Riana B. Jumamil June 14, 2019 4 Comments

They call it

A woman’s coin purse
Buried away like an afterthought
In the folds of her body.

But hers is a feral little thing
Throwing away angry outbursts
With the tide of each moon.

It scoffs at being
Belittled and unused
Writing her opinion in bloody letters.

Eye-Opener

Daniel Lee May 10, 2019 53 Comments

Daniel Lee ~

1. Bipolar disorder
2. History of postpartum psychosis
3. No custody of her children
4. In treatment for cocaine abuse
5. Regular smoker

I digest each of these facts on the computer screen in rapid succession, progressively cementing the picture of Renee Pryce, a twenty-eight-year-old woman in her final months of pregnancy.

I’m a first-year resident in a large urban county hospital.

Pregnancy Journal

Laurice Gilbert February 16, 2018 1 Comment

Laurice Gilbert ~

4th January 1986 / opened the journal and wrote the first entry:
swapped completely from mercury to digital thermometer

basal body temperature: a colorful set of graphs that each invests
3 months with footnotes, asterisks and inexplicable numbers

Reading: Birth Without Violence / The Paper Midwife
A Guide to Responsible Home Birth

21st January / passed my Distance Learning exam in Horticulture
Human Biology next

Too Close for Comfort

Andrea Eisenberg September 29, 2017 6 Comments

Andrea Eisenberg ~

Many years ago, on a busy day in my obstetrics-and-gynecology office, one of my partner’s patients came in for “bleeding, early pregnancy.” Since my partner wasn’t in that day, I saw the woman, whose name was Sarah. After we’d talked a bit, I examined her and did an ultrasound. As I’d expected, she was having a miscarriage. Feeling sorry that Sarah had to hear it from me, rather than from her

Alloimmune

Ksenia Olga Ross June 2, 2017 No Comments

“I only have bad options for you.”

I had visited this place, this stifling humid ultrasound room, a thousand times in my fears. But now it was real, and I had a choice to make. All the grinning, stupid hope I had embraced, the idea that this was a walk of faith I could use to teach others, rose up as a dark maroon flush in my chest. Hubris. The ancient Greek kind.

Blessed Events

Ronna L. Edelstein June 2, 2017 No Comments

Although I do not believe in medical miracles, I rejoice in the reality that I have experienced two—when I became pregnant with (and ultimately gave birth to) first my son and then my daughter.

From the age of thirteen-and-a-half, when I began menstruating, until age eighteen, I endured a great deal of pain whenever I got my period. My parents took me to the gynecologist, but he did nothing but assure me that “this too shall

Doe Eyes

Andrea Gordon January 27, 2017 19 Comments

Andrea Gordon

She burst into tears when I asked if she wanted to get pregnant.

Eman, a beautiful young woman from Jordan, sat in my family-practice office with her husband, Ali, and two adorable children about one and two years old. With her scarf and dark clothing covering all but her pale face and enormous sable-brown eyes, Eman looked closer to fourteen than twenty-four, and scarcely old enough to have any children.

Perspective

Margot Gardin January 12, 2017 3 Comments

“Your ovaries never developed.”

I am trying—and failing—to wrap my mind around those four words, to grasp the weight of their meaning, but every time I try to speak or swallow, the sharpness of the word “never” lodges in my throat. Never, meaning never counting the number of fingers on an ultrasound, never feeling the flutter of little toes against your abdomen, never arguing about whether you prefer the name Sophie or Sophia,

Perfect Timing

Linda Kobert December 23, 2016 5 Comments

Linda Kobert

Monday, 7:30 am, DR two. I’m circulating,
the nurse who isn’t sterile, the surgical team’s link
with the unclean world. Before the incision,
I have ten things to do. I keep the list in my head:
check suction, position lights, turn on Bovie, toe
the steel bucket next to the surgeon’s feet.

The scrub nurse and I do the count: sponges, needles, clamps.
I chart

The Apparition

Andrea Eisenberg June 2, 2016 No Comments

The drug wore off, and in a minute’s time I travelled from epidural bliss to full-on, body-wrenching pain. An ominous feeling welled up inside me, and then it came bursting out in a primal scream.

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