So..Yeah, That Just Happened...

This was a scary week. I had my annual exam with my new Midwife on Monday and she found a lump in my left breast. It felt a lot like every other lump in there except it was a little bigger and "funny" on the edges. She told me not to panic but that she wanted to refer me to the breast health center for an ultrasound just to be sure it was nothing. I left the office feeling like a stunned bird who had just flown into a window. I did not see that coming.

In every way I loved this midwifery practice. The woman I saw was just like my mom in her "way" with patients. There was a feeling that finally, I had found someone who would be with me, the way I had always seen my Mother with women. I was instantly very comfortable with her. Then....she did my exam and told me all of this. My mind reeled. I had felt lumps and had written them off as "boob fat lumps". I heard my mom rolling her eyes at twenty-one year-old me saying "it's nothing, you're such a hypochondriac. She told me that "of course, everyone thinks the big C when they hear lump" but she didn't want to freak me out she just wanted to be sure.

She took my blood pressure which was now soundly elevated to about 165/83, did my bi manual exam (always a treat) and then we talked a little more about my health history. I told her yes, I would like to get pregnant in the next two years and I was trying to lose a little weight. She noted that it would be best for me and my fertility to shed some pounds and suggested the high blood pressure diet. Ahhrg! I don't have high blood pressure. My cardiovascular system is in fantastic health. I can run forever! I am over my ideal weight and under the most incredible pressure I have ever felt in my life to "get everything right" right now. Also, I don't sleep normal people hours and I work in a place where people are dead/dying, faking/drug seeking. insane/off of their medications, pregnant and bleeding/miscarrying, or disconnected from the health care system and are using us as a primary care facility. It is HARD to be there and in a job where you get to do very little to make any sort of immediate or long term impact. I am not in a job where I might get a save or make an important call tonight, tomorrow or three days from now. I fetch blankets, dip urine, move people to ultrasound, chart on the broken and dying, occasionally, I do some chest compressions but a trained monkey could fill my slot with very little effort. Sometimes waiting for my job to "mean more" takes a toll. Anyway, all of that plus a fucking lump in my breast is enough to get a girl's BP up. It's not because I am fat. I am pretty sure of that.

So, I left the office in a foggy haze. I kept thinking that I wished I was walking out of there with the happy news that I was pregnant instead of the news of a lump. Wrong kind of lump I thought over and over again. Wrong damned lump! I got in the car and called my mom. I cried and cried. I told her everything expecting that she would give me some sort of "this is nothing" schpeel. Her words were "well how scary is that?" I replied through sobs that it was pretty f-ing scary. I felt so far away from her. So far away from my dad. Shit I even missed The Hubbs mom. I wanted anyone parental around me. I felt like if one of them were there there would be no way some big scary grown-up disease could grow in my body. I knew the odds of this lump being nothing were very very high. I also know that every young woman who has fought breast cancer at a tender age had the exact same odds and there is nothing special about me that should make me any different. Odds are just that, odds.

I got home and the Hubbs was asleep after working the night before. I told him they found a lump in my left breast and he said "oh honey, I'm sorry" and fell back asleep. I didn't begrudge him this at all. I know what REM sleep is all about and I knew that him waking up at that moment wasn't going to change anything. I called the specialist's office and made an appointment for Wednesday. Then I got ready to go to my clinical rotation. That night I was in Labor and Delivery. It felt like some kind of fucked up providence that I would be going to watch women have babies. Warped, I know. Anyway, I went and I observed and it was as miraculous and wonderful as always. I know that sounds dry and devoid of true emotion but my experience in L&D is the subject of a whole nother post on many things including the deep emotions I feel towards women in labor.

The next two days were mostly a big blur. Wednesday came and I got up and ready for my appointment. I walked into an office and filled out some papers with a graphical drawing of two breasts asking me to mark the target area. It felt like target shooting. Next a woman called out "Mrs Melnick?" That was the first time anyone had called me that other than jokingly. Again, wrong fucking ultrasound....Wrong wrong wrong. I went into a changing room that looked like a very fancy fitting room at a department store. I put on this strange cape and a robe and left my pants and shoes on. I was lead to a small room where the Hubbs was waiting for me. A very nice French woman put hot jelly on Lefty and smoshed around for a while. She reported that she didn't see anything concerning but the doctor was in the next room over and she was going to have him come talk to me and have a look. I was half-way to relief. The doctor came is and brought with him a young man about my own age who was a radiology resident. They both took a look at Lefty and there was more poking and now cold jelly. It felt strange to lay on a table with one breast hanging out talking about how I don't have menstrual cycles anymore. Very foreign. He didn't find anything concerning. The lump was a collection of glands and fatty breast tissue. It was normal. I was fine.

I felt happy and exhausted walking out of the office. I decided to scrap the day of school and went home to fall fast asleep in my husband's arms. Sweet sleep of relief. I called my parents and told them to sound the all clear. I was lucky. Barb, Irene and millions of other women are not so lucky. I feel lucky. I will do whatever I need to to loose the pre-baby weight, to stay healthy, to love my own body, to lower my goddamnned blood pressure. I have tasted the fear of illness and I am not ready to fight through it yet. I am not ready to wage that war even with the hubbs at my side. And BOY let me tell you he was at my side.

When I started panicking about the what ifs he didn't tell me I was crazy, when I started fretting that this might mean no babies, no breasts, no...anything...he didn't try to convince me that it was insane. He held me and told me he was sorry I was sad and frightened but that he wasn't yet. He told me he has never doubted that we will have many fat, healthy babies and live a long time together watching them grow up and watching their fat healthy babies grow up as well. He wins! Shit, I win. I married that man. I love him so for all the things he said and didn't say, for calmly going to the appointment with me and for thinking that the most awkward part of the whole day was when the doctor walked in while he was kissing my arm. I love him.

So, the moral of the story is that I don't have the big 'C', I am refocusing my efforts to relax, slim down, get healthy. I went for an 8 mile run with the Hubbs and the young dog today. It was good. I was tired but it was do-able. We had a great conversation about babies and the Hubbs has humored me with the loose goal of Christmas 2011 as the IUD pulling target. I just have to lose the weight and get hired, through orientation, and squirrel away some cash to pay for a home birth.

Midwives, home births, labor and delivery, and nursing school are all topics for near future posts. For tonight I am just thankful to have 2 strong feet, attached to 2 strong legs, 2 lumpy yet, healthy breasts, and the sweetest, strongest, toughest and most compassionate husband ever. And that is more than enough.

Can relief and dissappointment be coemergent?

I went on my run today and felt like crap. I could easily have been that it was blowing stink and raining and cold. My legs burned, my lungs felt tired and I wanted to stop the whole time. It was by all measures a sucky run. The good news was that I was meeting a friend to study and I was meeting her at the other end of my 4.5mi run. It meant I had to keep going. My keys and my phone were in my bag which was at the coffee shop. I survived my run and even managed to run more than I walked. I sat at the shop studying all day full of snot and sneezing and my body felt strange. My breasts hurt and I felt all weepy and anxious and strange. I couldn't put my finger on it but it has been going on for days now. Its a little insane actually as the weight loss had been reflected in the bra as well until last week when they seemed to double in size overnight and became achy. The real shit of the whole thing is that I have an IUD and thus, should not be getting pregnant according to the statistics as well as the shear infrequency of our sex life. It shouldn't be possible to get pregnant on once a week sex. That should be my pay off for not getting to see my husband more than one night a week. That one night should be risk free. Anyway, what I am saying is that I don't have the luxury (?) of periods to mark my non-pregnant state with the IUD so things are a lot less concrete than they were before. They are a lot better without the monthly exhaustion and cramping and bleeding and all of that glory, but it leaves things open for interpretation or speculation. I have a healthy stock of home pregnancy tests and take one every few months or so just to be sure or if I have a feeling or a scary dream...I'm insane I know!

Anyway, I am trying to say that I thought I was pregnant today. I just thought I should take a test anyway because I didn't feel right. I took a test as soon as I got home today and it is supposed to show a blue "control" line no matter what and a pink line if I was pregnant. This particular one showed the blue line and then the whole background turned pink. No pink line just all pink background. What the fuck does all pink mean!? Beyond that what the fuck am I going to do if I take another one and I am pregnant? I can't get pregnant right now. I really can't. I am about to quit my job for the summer for my internship and live completely off of Garth's support. I am having a WEDDING in SEPTEMBER! Oh my god! What the hell am I going to do? At the same time I got excited. Really excited about the thought of watching my body change and meeting a new little soul who is part G and part me, watching G become a dad and become comfortable with a tiny person who would grow into a little person and then a big person. I just can't wait for the day when we get to do all of that together. Now back to reality where I say NO NO NO NO! That is not my plan. My plan was/is to graduate and wait another 18months before even starting to try. That would put me about 2 years out from right now. That would hopefully get me enough time to have established myself at a job and in the field a little bit. I would be ready. I would be in the perfect time frame and age of 29. Ok, Ok, long story endless as my friend says...I peed again 40min later (damned bladder!)....and I am NOT pregnant. It was a relief...and a disappointment. I am not so secretly afraid that I won't be able to get pregnant. I sort of convinced myself that if I were pregnant, even if the timing sucks beyond sucks, it would mean I CAN get pregnant. I know that G would be wonderful and amazing if I had peed a tiny pink line. I know also that he was relieved to hear me say I am not. He is the most wonderful person I could have ever dared dream marry. He wants kids as badly as I do but we have a plan. We have a schedule for this stuff so we can keep moving towards what we both say we want in life both independently and together. I love our plan and am happy to not have to adjust everything to accommodate a little person right now but I was a little disappointed. I won't lie. So, with that, I will do a little yoga and head to bed.

"You're a Married Woman Now...."

All the romantical travel magazines and wedding sites would have a girl believe that once married she will spend a little time in the following way....
Lounging about on a beach looking post-coital and blissed out. Or maybe wearing white, flowing garments and walking hand and hand on the beach....or better yet sitting barefoot in side by side hammocks sipping umbrella drinks. Bliss bliss bliss! Well, I am here to tell you that it ain't so. Instead, I am wearing the sexiest of blue scrubs, a hair net, a surgical mask and a stethoscope about my neck. I am trolling the halls of the OR doing my best to looks smart and capable in hopes that some anesthesiologist will give me a shot at an airway.

The paper wedding is still mostly a secret as there are just some family members who would be hurt or upset about it and we don't want to hurt anyone or cause any strife. We did what we did because it was what was best for us and our particular situation. We made it more than just signing papers because it is MORE than just paperwork when you commit to spend the rest of your life with someone. We wanted to be able to address how special the occasion was without making a super involved process out of it. As I have said before, this was about us and September is about our families and friends....but I digress.

I initially decided to write this post in response to another blogger's post about her feelings about family. She writes about how she doesn't want kids and how she feels about the liberty people take expressing their opinions about young married women and "family". She tells the classic stories about the unwelcome opinions from the little old ladies saying "Oh, you'll never feel complete until you have children", or "Someday you'll wake up and realize you missed something". She doesn't see it this way. She expresses thoughts that she would feel trapped and angry if she found herself going though pregnancy and motherhood. She points out how once you get married you are supposed to want babies and how married people get pregnant and keep the babies and if they don't often there is a great deal of struggle and discord between families.

This is interesting to me. I want babies and the Hubbs wants babies too. In fact, we are crazy for babies and I am really looking forward to 18 months or so from now when I get to take the breaks off and see if I can even GET pregnant. However, six months ago I had a friend call and tell me she was pregnant. She had a sweet boyfriend who was a victim of the current economy, she had amazing parents with very liberal minds who would have likely been very happy to help her, and she had a good strong head on her shoulders. She also had just received an acceptance letter to graduate school. Her life's dream was to be an engineer and she had the chance to achieve that goal. She called me because I am that girl. My mother was a Nurse Midwife and all my adolescent/adult life I have been little miss women's health information. I talked with her about what I knew. There is a great clinic in the city where she lived at the time, one where they really respected women and their options. My friend 'N' knew that if she told her boy or her mom they would want her to keep the baby. She knew that was a death sentence for her dream. Long story short she decided not to have the baby and she is now working her way through graduate school. This spurred a conversation with my mom. I told her about my buddy and told her that I didn't know what I would do if it were me who was pregnant. I had just been accepted into a 11 month paramedic program that would definitely NOT be conducive to a pregnancy and would actually be out of the question in the last few months. It would be impossible to complete an internship filled with CPR, intubations, and stretcher fetching while enormously pregnant. Also impossible would be doing all of this while nursing and not sleeping during the first few months of motherhood. The upside would be that my program is very accommodating and I would be able to take the time off to have the baby and get my feet under me again before they would set me up to finish my education be it testing, interning, whatever...They are great. They have accommodated illness, fire academy and serious family situations in the past. That is not the point though. I had told my mom that I didn't think now would be an OK time. I thought mom would be all supportive and proud of me for being sensible and driven. Weeeeeell, my mom had other thoughts. She gave me the "talk" of a lifetime about how unrealistic women of my generation are and how it is getting us into more trouble than we realize. She says all this waiting for the "right time" is part of our controlling nature instilled in us by the culture of our time. She pointed out that I am (was) in a fantastic, supportive relationship with enough income to have a nice place to live, good insurance through my job as well as his, supportive family near by...all good things. All more than a lot of families have when they first start out. She had a point. I had long waited to be in such a good place in life. I had all the fundamentals in place. It would not be convenient but it would be OK. I was flabbergasted to think that I was *here*. I was in the zone where it was no longer insane to think of having a baby in fact, I am almost to the "you're not getting any younger" stage. It was no longer a "teen pregnancy". When the F did I get so OLD!?!!?? I know 26 is not geriatric but it is also not teenage anymore (thank god!). I just don't remember getting here. It was a real head trip to think about reaching this phase of my life. It was even stranger to realize that my friend 'N' was theoretically, there too. As modern women we had reached that diving board where we were about to start making those decisions about life, education, family and our futures. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I don't think her parents know to this day. I don't know if she ever told the boyfriend. I regret to report I haven't talked to her in quite some time as we are both pretty overwhelmed with school right now. But the message is in there none the less.

As women we are being told that we should be sexy, smart, driven, sensitive, organized, spontaneous, laid back, committed and family oriented. We are being told to be Betty crocker, June cleaver, as well as the CEO with a corner office. Who can do this? I am not saying we have to choose career or family, success in the outside arena or a happy home but I DO want to point out that women these days are expected to make a home, grow people inside of them....breast feed and rule to corporate world. The expectations and opportunities of the modern times have not absolved us of the "responsibilities" bestowed on us by our mothers, grandmothers and the many way backs before them. It's sort of insane! To add insult to injury we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. Women who marry and have families, who "settle down" and do the wife/mom thing while they are young are labeled sell outs, unmotivated, gold diggers...Women who decide to forgo the "family life" in the traditional sense, are labeled as cold, ball busters, selfish, or worse, barren. If you don't "dare" to take on the balancing act or *gasp* don't want to for whatever reason you are judged. Why People?! Why can't we just let people have their choices and lives? Why are women the target of this? Men don't get this shit. If a man is sitting around with his buds and says "nah, we have decided not to have kids" his buds are likely not going to say "Ahw brah, you HAVE to have kids! You won't feel complete, your clock will be ticking, you'll feel like something is missing..." It just isn't common. Anyway, my aim with today's post is to point out the insanity of what we put married women though as a culture. I am not trying to leave the single ladies or the dating ladies out of this particular post but lets face it, married women fall into a whole different puddle of expectations after the I Do. I am lucky enough to have supportive family however, I am also looking forward to babies be they homegrown or adopted. I don't have to go though the process of going against the grain of my family's opinions and hopes for us. That process was saved for the name change process which is another post all together.

Fitness Day 44
15min free weights and get-ups
35min aquajogging.