I know last week I wrote about how pregnancy is an isolating process, but this week I'm thinking about how it can be an equalizing experience for women. I found out surreptitiously that someone I know pregnant as well. It was strange to think that all this time she was probably avoiding morning coffee and hiding urges to hurl as much as I was.
Because in the end, as much as our bodies change differently, they change, and perhaps in some way we all feel the same. Out of control, helpless, confused, surreal. There are nights I sit at home feeling like it's 2 AM and realize it just turned 7 PM, and wonder if it makes me a total loser to crawl into bed and stay there for the seventh straight day in a row. I wonder how my life turned into this amorphous blob of non-productive nothingness, like a radio with all the interesting stations tuned out. I look at all the spry women around me and envy them their normalness. At this point it doesn't feel real that there's anything actually inside of me. I mostly just look and feel like I do when I've had too big a meal and need to pop a pants button—bloated and fatigued. I wonder, in my low moments, whether this is all some cosmic joke.
But then I think about some other folks to gather strength. Like my friend telling me her baby just smiled at her for the first time. Or the story I heard about someone throwing up the entire nine months (I have it good, I guess). I picture my childhood friend who's now nearly due, and it always makes me happy. When I round in the NICU I look at the wrinkly little newborns in their spaceship-like incubators and think about the mothers who carried them. I think about how my fingers pucker in the bath and wonder what it's like being submerged for nine months. I flip through pictures of my mom when she was pregnant, of my mother-in-law with palm on her round belly, smiling a secret smile.
And then, seen in those faces and stories around me, it feels a little more real. Like my mom says, for each stage, a feeling: remember it, because then it passes. But then the memories. And the feeling you've shared a little bit of something universal.
Week Thirteen
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Isolation and Intimacy
“But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” –Luke 2:19
I’m currently on the consult service at Hopkins, or rather I am the consult service at Hopkins. I spend my days scurrying miles from one end of the place to another, coat pockets stuffed with drops and lenses, indirect ophthalmoscope looped around one arm. In one sense it’s refreshing to get outside the eye building, walk through the rest of the medicine world. In another it’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating.
Ophthalmology is a world most physicians know nothing about, and aren’t bothered to know anything about; we joke the usual reason for consult is “the patient has an eye and something could be wrong with it.” You’d never consider calling a cardiology consult without pulling out a stethoscope and usually ordering an EKG first, but I’ve never been presented with a useful history or attempted exam before being asked to see someone. Everyone has stories about the consult for “blurry vision” for which the treatment was “have patient put on his glasses.”
On the other hand, the eye is a valuable and mysterious thing, which most understandably approach with caution. In some ways pregnancy is like that: significant but enigmatic. Sometimes isolating and misunderstood—I imagine after we make the news public it will be less so, but I think there’s always a deeper part of it that is separating, from normalcy, from husband and peers.
I think about this when I read about Mary treasuring up and pondering. I’ve always liked the intimacy of that verse, the secret weighing and inner lingering about it. I suppose that’s the boon in these first three private months, and the following months of solitary transformation: the pondering into being of a new intimacy, with myself, God, and a new life. In the end that’s what I like best about ophthalmology: its unique understanding of an intricate and mysterious structure, and the intimacy that brings with the patients to whom it brings valuable sight. I’m changed in the knowing and touching of it, people are changed, and if I have to work a little harder to share it, all the better in the end.
Week Twelve
I’m currently on the consult service at Hopkins, or rather I am the consult service at Hopkins. I spend my days scurrying miles from one end of the place to another, coat pockets stuffed with drops and lenses, indirect ophthalmoscope looped around one arm. In one sense it’s refreshing to get outside the eye building, walk through the rest of the medicine world. In another it’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating.
Ophthalmology is a world most physicians know nothing about, and aren’t bothered to know anything about; we joke the usual reason for consult is “the patient has an eye and something could be wrong with it.” You’d never consider calling a cardiology consult without pulling out a stethoscope and usually ordering an EKG first, but I’ve never been presented with a useful history or attempted exam before being asked to see someone. Everyone has stories about the consult for “blurry vision” for which the treatment was “have patient put on his glasses.”
On the other hand, the eye is a valuable and mysterious thing, which most understandably approach with caution. In some ways pregnancy is like that: significant but enigmatic. Sometimes isolating and misunderstood—I imagine after we make the news public it will be less so, but I think there’s always a deeper part of it that is separating, from normalcy, from husband and peers.
I think about this when I read about Mary treasuring up and pondering. I’ve always liked the intimacy of that verse, the secret weighing and inner lingering about it. I suppose that’s the boon in these first three private months, and the following months of solitary transformation: the pondering into being of a new intimacy, with myself, God, and a new life. In the end that’s what I like best about ophthalmology: its unique understanding of an intricate and mysterious structure, and the intimacy that brings with the patients to whom it brings valuable sight. I’m changed in the knowing and touching of it, people are changed, and if I have to work a little harder to share it, all the better in the end.
Week Twelve
Monday, February 23, 2009
Sovereign Mysteries
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view… Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
“The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
One thing conception unveils is God’s sovereignty. I don’t know that the beginnings of life is really anything that anyone understands. I remember in high school editing a research proposal about enzymes released by the egg on contact with a sperm. I remember looking at electron microscopy photos of that moment of fusion in cell biology, studying the statistics of chromosomal separation in third-year genetics. I remember the first time I saw part of a fetus, in an abortion clinic as a medical student. They sifted through the suctioned bloody contents and I saw materialize a single transparent, perfectly formed miniature bent leg and foot, floating in the red haze like a piece of glass.
I remember waiting for my period, two weeks after we’d decided to stop contraception, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be it. Then seeing two lines instead of one on Christmas day.
In the end the whole thing is a fearful, wondrous mystery. Who can understand this moment of union between two traveling cells moments before their deaths? Their rooting in some dark invisible cavern in my body? And the wriggling thing with bloated belly and waving limbs on the ultrasound screen? Who can begin to comprehend the changes that will happen in our lives?
As a pathologically self-reliant person, I think about the utter lack of control we had over this bit of life coming into being, over how my body’s already changed, and I’m reminded of God’s true sovereignty in my life. How he is the giver of all things, of how in the end I have given my life and body to him. It’s a sometimes scary, often comforting, but always humbling thing.
Week Eleven
“The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
One thing conception unveils is God’s sovereignty. I don’t know that the beginnings of life is really anything that anyone understands. I remember in high school editing a research proposal about enzymes released by the egg on contact with a sperm. I remember looking at electron microscopy photos of that moment of fusion in cell biology, studying the statistics of chromosomal separation in third-year genetics. I remember the first time I saw part of a fetus, in an abortion clinic as a medical student. They sifted through the suctioned bloody contents and I saw materialize a single transparent, perfectly formed miniature bent leg and foot, floating in the red haze like a piece of glass.
I remember waiting for my period, two weeks after we’d decided to stop contraception, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be it. Then seeing two lines instead of one on Christmas day.
In the end the whole thing is a fearful, wondrous mystery. Who can understand this moment of union between two traveling cells moments before their deaths? Their rooting in some dark invisible cavern in my body? And the wriggling thing with bloated belly and waving limbs on the ultrasound screen? Who can begin to comprehend the changes that will happen in our lives?
As a pathologically self-reliant person, I think about the utter lack of control we had over this bit of life coming into being, over how my body’s already changed, and I’m reminded of God’s true sovereignty in my life. How he is the giver of all things, of how in the end I have given my life and body to him. It’s a sometimes scary, often comforting, but always humbling thing.
Week Eleven
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Hormonal Anarchy
“Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns. Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood..” -Annie Proulx, opening lines of The Shipping News
Maybe it’s because this is the first time in fifteen years I’ve experienced major hormonal changes, but I feel like I’m a teenager again. The thought occurred to me as I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror peering at my fourth major pimple. The last time this had happened my sisters called me “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer” for a week. My breasts are changing, and then there’s the nastier bloating, constipation, gas, excess saliva production, and the worst, nausea.
Morning sickness is about the worst misnomer I have ever encountered: my particular brand involves not ever actually vomiting, but feeling on the verge of doing so for the entire day. It’s undulating but unremitting, and with teen-like angst it feels like years since I’ve felt remotely normal, though in reality it’s been more like one month. Some triggers are predictable, like the thought/smell/presence/remote possibility of food. Others are idiosyncratic: humidity, the smell of my shampoo, being touched on the belly. For some reason the smell of our hand cleansers in clinic would send me into spasms of queasiness while focusing through microscopes and lenses all day would not.
The striking thing is how my world revolves around constant nausea, a major change for someone who’s never been sick for more than a few days at a time before. It’s like adolescence all over again: the moodiness, the self-pity, the sense of isolation, even the fantasizing. If only someone would do this right now, I’d feel better—“this” ranging from “buy me jewelry” to “cook clam chowder” to “get me out of work.”
But the reality is that I’ve no control over this riot of hormones, and worse yet, no understanding of what drooling and biliousness has to do with preparing to be a mother. It seems like some mysterious, aimless rite of passage, a brand of suffering forgettable enough that my own mother barely recalled experiencing it. Maybe there is something about all this that, like zits and training bras, is meant to drive home the point that major changes loom ahead, during a time when our bodies would otherwise seem the same. Maybe we are meant to begin learning how to focus past discomfort for the sake of someone other than ourselves. Or maybe to begin getting used to being inconvenienced. I’m not sure, but in the meanwhile, I’ll be nibbling Saltines and looking forward to the day it all passes.
Week Ten
Maybe it’s because this is the first time in fifteen years I’ve experienced major hormonal changes, but I feel like I’m a teenager again. The thought occurred to me as I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror peering at my fourth major pimple. The last time this had happened my sisters called me “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer” for a week. My breasts are changing, and then there’s the nastier bloating, constipation, gas, excess saliva production, and the worst, nausea.
Morning sickness is about the worst misnomer I have ever encountered: my particular brand involves not ever actually vomiting, but feeling on the verge of doing so for the entire day. It’s undulating but unremitting, and with teen-like angst it feels like years since I’ve felt remotely normal, though in reality it’s been more like one month. Some triggers are predictable, like the thought/smell/presence/remote possibility of food. Others are idiosyncratic: humidity, the smell of my shampoo, being touched on the belly. For some reason the smell of our hand cleansers in clinic would send me into spasms of queasiness while focusing through microscopes and lenses all day would not.
The striking thing is how my world revolves around constant nausea, a major change for someone who’s never been sick for more than a few days at a time before. It’s like adolescence all over again: the moodiness, the self-pity, the sense of isolation, even the fantasizing. If only someone would do this right now, I’d feel better—“this” ranging from “buy me jewelry” to “cook clam chowder” to “get me out of work.”
But the reality is that I’ve no control over this riot of hormones, and worse yet, no understanding of what drooling and biliousness has to do with preparing to be a mother. It seems like some mysterious, aimless rite of passage, a brand of suffering forgettable enough that my own mother barely recalled experiencing it. Maybe there is something about all this that, like zits and training bras, is meant to drive home the point that major changes loom ahead, during a time when our bodies would otherwise seem the same. Maybe we are meant to begin learning how to focus past discomfort for the sake of someone other than ourselves. Or maybe to begin getting used to being inconvenienced. I’m not sure, but in the meanwhile, I’ll be nibbling Saltines and looking forward to the day it all passes.
Week Ten
Here at the Place of All Beginnings
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” -Tolkein, The Fellowship of the Ring
Welcome, from a rusty and itinerant writer. It’s been a long time since I’ve written regularly. In a sense much of residency thus far has been about surviving, something I see more clearly now watching D go through the experience. I didn’t have it in me much to pen more than bits of griping, but things are lightening up now at work. Much as earlier when things were facing a new stage—studying for the Boards and starting on the wards in med school, beginning to date and eventually getting married—another major shift in life is coming.
Writing is such a healthy practice for me; it’s how I best process and meditate, something I used to do deeply much more frequently than I naturally do now. It’s good to return to that. Writing encourages reading, observation, and spiritual genuflection. Still, it’s not something I do easily without external encouragement, probably because I am lazy at heart, so I ought to thank D and particularly my sister for bugging me to write. My dad even mentioned once, “write something your child can read down the line.” Weird thought.
This blog will be similar in spirit and style to my last one, Omer of Manna (www.xanga.com/eih). I felt the colors needed a change-up, and for all of that I must credit my sister again, who designed this entire webpage using the interface of her brilliant computer programming skills and the innate artistry I still envy. If it were not for her, you would be reading black text on an entirely white background.
The first few entries are back-dated. You’ll probably also find they’re fixated on physical topics, reflecting my obsession with constant nausea during the first trimester… I’ll try to expand topics in the future. Some posts are from previous writings that still resonate with me now.
That said, here’s to a fresh start! Welcome along for the journey. And warm thanks to faithful readers.
Week Fourteen (ie, thank God for the second trimester).
Welcome, from a rusty and itinerant writer. It’s been a long time since I’ve written regularly. In a sense much of residency thus far has been about surviving, something I see more clearly now watching D go through the experience. I didn’t have it in me much to pen more than bits of griping, but things are lightening up now at work. Much as earlier when things were facing a new stage—studying for the Boards and starting on the wards in med school, beginning to date and eventually getting married—another major shift in life is coming.
Writing is such a healthy practice for me; it’s how I best process and meditate, something I used to do deeply much more frequently than I naturally do now. It’s good to return to that. Writing encourages reading, observation, and spiritual genuflection. Still, it’s not something I do easily without external encouragement, probably because I am lazy at heart, so I ought to thank D and particularly my sister for bugging me to write. My dad even mentioned once, “write something your child can read down the line.” Weird thought.
This blog will be similar in spirit and style to my last one, Omer of Manna (www.xanga.com/eih). I felt the colors needed a change-up, and for all of that I must credit my sister again, who designed this entire webpage using the interface of her brilliant computer programming skills and the innate artistry I still envy. If it were not for her, you would be reading black text on an entirely white background.
The first few entries are back-dated. You’ll probably also find they’re fixated on physical topics, reflecting my obsession with constant nausea during the first trimester… I’ll try to expand topics in the future. Some posts are from previous writings that still resonate with me now.
That said, here’s to a fresh start! Welcome along for the journey. And warm thanks to faithful readers.
Week Fourteen (ie, thank God for the second trimester).
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