prenatals

we had our first medical prenatal yesterday. the experience was very different from our previous prenatal with our midwife.

WAITING ROOM
Selena, midwife--couch, play area for kids, water cooler, birth artwork
Dr. Chan, ob/gyn--chairs, magazines, pee on demand in a sterile cup, lovely baby & mama b&w glamor shots

WAIT TIME
midwife--5 minutes
ob--1.5 hours (approx one hour spent naked in a hospital gown and a tissue paper sheet.) medical assistant takes blood pressure and weighs me. i've gained about 5 pounds.

INITIAL CONSULTATION
midwife--2+hours: big hugs, trung next to me on the couch or bed, conversation about medical history, emotional process, experiences, parenting approach, cultural expectations, nutritional counseling (and some negotiation on getting optimal nutrients from food), expectations of the midwife's role, family involvement, snacks & water for the hungry pregnant lady, something to put my feet up on, pee when i need to in a dixie cup, assessment of our bé|baby's golden-orange aura & spirit, journalling assignments, drawing birth visualization exercise, lie on a bed fully clothed, blood pressure & heartrate, fetascope and gentle palpation on my abdomen, more big hugs, lots of reassurance of normality. no internal exams til 36 weeks.
ob--30 minutes: succinct clinical monotone apology for being one and a half hours late, made trung move his chair 3 feet away from me to make room for the ultrasound equipment, medical history intake, breast exam, crazy transformer dental chair that converts to spread eagled prone position with stirrups and my ass hanging over the edge (the less engagement from patients the better huh? keep 'em passive. though i was mind-numbed from the wait time, at least i wasn't strapped down), pap smear (yugh! do you know how sensitive my cervix is right now? she bleeds if you just look at her sideways), explanation of the practice while conducting an ambush bimanual internal exam (no warning! why do doctors think ambush & distraction is the best policy for unpleasant procedures?), ghost ultrasound and some hokey measurement, mentioning all the ways bé can have birth defects and the standard tests i can take with no explanation of risks, insistence on prenatal vitamins regardless of diet (i can already see her classifying me as non-compliant), no snacks or water (did i mention how hungry i was after 1.5 hours of mindless waiting?), handshake. not cold, but not warm. weo, neither were we.

anyways so after explaining to me that ultrasounds after the first trimester are not accurate in dating me being in the 14th week and all, she plops jelly on my belly and ultrasounds me on the pap smear chair-cum-table (seat came back up) with no where to put my feet. despite having seen my cervix and bimanually felt me up, she still had no idea where my uterus was and kept the device in the middle to no avail. so i finally had to tell her um, my uterus is on the left. and boom, there was the ghost of our bé (ok, maybe not like boom, all we saw were grey & black blurs. and its all grey and grainy like something out of The Ring, but not freaky scary. not bathed in golden light. just grey and ghostly. okay, so on the one hand, here's confirmation that bé has a head, arms & legs and a little chirping heart. a little more real. not just a figment of our imaginations. on the other hand, it's a ghost on a grey-black monitor being controlled, measured and assessed by some stranger who is insisting that according to her admittedly inaccurate ultrasound measurement, baby is only 11 weeks 5 days along and that therefore my due date is in March. and that just does not sound right to me. but then again, the delicate choreograph of menstruation, ovulation and conception responsive to mood, mentality and moon is not exactly science. and flying down to San D that last week of May thinking bà ngoại wasn't gonna make it, maybe that disturbed my biorhythm more than i thought. and maybe that post-bday womb blessing loosened up more than i thought. we'll see...

Dr. Chan didnt seem to believe me when i mentioned that we'll know dates for sure at 20 weeks because the fundus (top of my uterus) will be at navel level (a midwife truism and a universal for all pregnant women). and i forgot to point out that she herself said that ultrasounds were not accurate for dates after the 12th week. i refused the vaginal ultrasound. i don't need a phallic device emitting ultrasonic cellular mutation in or around my already scraped up cervix.

already this medical prenatal had T. worried about folic acid, birth defects, and the normalcy of our bé. bé would let me know if anything was wrong. and though i'm generally a bit of a worrier with some hypochondriac tendencies, i feel content and a sense of well-being. no worries. so T. said he would trust me and bé and not let the doctor/medical establishment control our experience or deny us our rights through manipulating our ignorance.

in this life, this society, either you make informed choices or someone else, someone in a position of power, makes them for you. of course, most of the vaunted "freedom of choice" boils down to consumer decisions like about whether to support government-subsidized, eco-cidal, genetically-modified, irradiating, toxin polluting industrial agriculture corporation or pay the real cost of producing food to a small organic family farmer while trying to balance your own precarious budget. because in this society, money = power. we're trying our best to be engaged and not give our power away without exuding smug about it. it's a thin line. at least we won't be mistaken for those angry hippies in Berkeley Bowl. they need to take another bongh!t or drop a lil more acid cuz their mellow groove has become rude, entitled smuginess.

so on our journey to becoming parents we make the first of many parenting decisions... we're minimizing tetragenic exposure to alcohol, drugs, synthetic/toxic chemicals and ultrasounds. we prioritize good nutrition as the most important factor for the health of our bé. and along with that, we're not doing any of the genetic testing. we oppose eugenicism as a system of oppression, domination & genocide and we're not going to be tricked into it by medical prenatal propaganda about knowing the baby's health.

previously, we received a week-by-week glossy of a baby's development process in 4D. and it just seemed freaky invasive, exploitative and really just pornographic to me like those old National Geographics (or colonial postcards) with exotic naked natives and no captions about who they were, their family, no names, no context, no humanity. what's up with the patriarchal desire for panopticon omniscience and the need to know (and control) the mystery of creation?

so we didnt keep a printout of the ultrasound. i prefer to look within and commune with our bé bathed in the golden light of its spirit and our love, not bond with some externally-generated technology-produced paparazzi ghost image adulated object. we choose to walk the spiritual route, not the material.

smug check! weo, at least we don't drive a hybrid. yet.

still waiting on the hybrid minivan to make its way here from Japan where it's been on the market since 2001. as TLC puts it, "It takes courage to drive a mini-van."