Flabbergasted

I was right: my ex-OB was lying to me.

I mentioned she’d told me I had placenta previa.

At the 20-week scan the radiologist had just said I had a low-lying placenta that she sees in 15-20% of all women – I’ll need to be checked on again in 8 or so weeks at which point the placenta will likely not be low-lying anymore.

A few nights later, at 8pm while we had dinner guests arriving, my ex-OB calls, I answer the phone, she says, you have a problem with your placenta, it’s over your cervix, you’ll need to refrain from all exercise, sex, and travel by flying until another scans shows it’s no longer over your cervix, bye-bye and see you in a month. I couldn’t sleep at all that night. A placenta over the cervix is very different from a low-lying one. Even I know that. The next day I called her to get further details, which I did not get – she just repeated what she’d already said, and when I asked her, what’s the exact position of the placenta because this wasn’t what they’d told me at the scan, she said no, it’s definitely over the cervix, then I asked, by how many centimeters, to which she just said with an angry huff, well I can’t tell you that.

That was the first time I thought I seriously need to look for someone else. It sounded… wrong, somehow, and not because I wouldn’t accept a diagnosis I needed to know in order to save my own and my child’s life but because it felt like she wasn’t being straight with me.

So I started looking around and researching and thinking and calling people.

Then I went for my next check-up and asked my ex-OB to look at the scan report again, and tell me what’s on it. She looked really quickly and said, it’s a full previa. Then she gave me some chit-chat about how it almost always clears up by the scheduled c-section date (that sounded wrong: as far as I know complete placenta previas are unlikely to “clear up” because the placenta grows into the uterine wall all around the cervix) and after delivering I can go back to doing anything I want to do.

She got up to leave but when she was almost out the door she turned around and said, oh by the way, you’ve already gained twenty pounds so you’ll need to cut back and watch what you eat. All I could say was, but you told me not to exercise – I couldn’t even finish the sentence, she just said, if you can’t keep your weight gain down, you’ll need to cut out carbs, then whipped around with my chart and left. I was dumbfounded. Not least because she’d tacked two pounds onto my actual weight gain to make her point. Not that two pounds makes such a huge difference but… still.

I went home crying, of course.

First thing I did that afternoon was request a copy of my records from the ultrasound unit I’d been to. Naturally, a couple weeks later they pretended they’d never received my fax. (What is it with American medical institutions that they want to keep your very own medical information a secret from you?)

Then I started making appointments in earnest to interview midwives. We’d already been talking about it endlessly with A, and we felt that if at all possible, a homebirth sounded really, really great to us.

Then yesterday I had my first real appointment with the midwife we chose. It was great. She was here for an hour and a half, talked to me about everything I was curious about, got a more thorough medical history from me than anyone’s taken in, oh, my entire life, was nice to Z, was nice to A (who came back from work to be there for a little while), checked on the baby’s position (head down) and heartrate, and also showed me my medical records, which she’d of course reviewed already. (Getting those records from my ex-OB’s office: THAT was interesting. She left me four(!) phone messages about it, worrying over the placenta and so forth. I did not talk to her. I could not.)

So… the midwives accepted me for their homebirth practice is because I’m extremely low-risk, with a 20-th week ultrasound report that says, and I quote, ‘placenta: posterior, marginal.’

Which is to say, low-lying, just like the radiologist said. My midwife said she’d be very surprised if it was still anywhere near marginal now, 8 weeks later. And if it is, with that diagnosis, even if the placenta stays marginal by the end of my pregnancy, all they’d do is come to the hospital with me (they have admitting privileges) and have me labor there, just in case there’s bleeding.

I looked at the scan report multiple times.

The doctor lied to me. Twice. I have no idea why someone would do that. Someone who’s supposed to be trusted with my unborn child’s and my life.

I can think of a rather sad explanation. There seemed to be something the doctor was impatient and anxious about – I know she has two very young children, less than two years apart, maybe that’s overwhelming – and it was clouding her judgement.

I can also think of an extremely cynical explanation. See, with both the baby and me being healthy (the baby’s been checked for chromosomal abnormalities and has no physiological problems, I have good blood pressure, good blood sugar levels, no allergies, no previous health problems), we’re good candidates for a scheduled c-section. Which would mean more money for my ex-OB’s practice and the hospital too.

That wouldn’t ever occur to me if things like it hadn’t happened to me before, even back in Hungary. Once I had hand surgery after an accident in gym class when I was 16, under general anesthesia that warranted, in those days, probably 4-5 days in the hospital. They kept me for a total of two weeks because – my family found out later – that particular department tended to keep healthy patients from being discharged because the government paid a quota per occupied bed and, since healthy patients didn’t need medication or special care, the department then had more money to spend on other patients. Which is a sad state of affairs, and not just because it’s pretty traumatic to be trapped in a hospital ward for a couple weeks, with no way of knowing when you might be let out, or why you’re not being let out. This was not a typical practice but it did sometimes happen. Still does, I’m afraid.

I’m also pretty sure the reasoning was somewhat similar for keeping Z in the NICU for 8 days after she was born, despite test results showing she had no signs of infection or stress or respiratory issues after just 3 days. In this case, I know how much money the hospital got for keeping her there. I paid those bills.

I still feel a ton of guilt for letting that happen to Z: I’m supposed to be the one who protects her and I just abandoned her to strangers and a lot of needles and isolation and not being held when she needed to be held. I shouldn’t have had such blind faith in The System, I should have known better and done my research before it all happened.

I can’t stop turning all this over in my mind. I will, of course, because at the same time I finally feel free to be happy about the coming birth of my child. But right now, I’m flabbergasted that people who are supposed to be looking out for my health could treat me and my unborn child with such disdain.

I can’t help feeling validated though. It felt like my ex-OB was lying to me. And she really was.