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05/05/2008
SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWW
The trouble with having had so many legitimate reasons to freak out is that it gets kind of hard to tell the difference.
Two weeks ago I had a scan at my MFM's office. Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring a week ahead of dates, in the 90th percentile for size.
Friday I had a scan at my OB's office. Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring exactly correctly for dates, in the 60th percentile for size.
I am trying to figure out how to type an onomatopoetic representation of that sound a phonograph needle makes when it's suddenly being dragged across a feel-good pop hit from the '60s. You know, like they sometimes do in movie trailers when they want to signify a sudden upsetting paradigm shift, like maybe that hot girl the camera was following down the street isn't really a hot girl at all, but Steve Buscemi in drag. Oh, it starts out innocuously enough...
Sugar
Awwww, honey honey
You are my cannndy, girrrrl
And you got me SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWWhat the fucking FUCK?
...and, okay, I don't mind having my preconceived notions about the intrinsic nature of human beauty challenged, but once that record is scratched and the soundtrack changes to, I don't know, "Dude Looks Like a Lady" or something, the bottom line is that you're still looking at Mr. Pink in falsies and a Spandex minidress. And the best you can say about the whole thing is that it could be worse. It could be Benicio del Toro.
The OB who did the scan seemed unconcerned. "I wouldn't worry" is what he said. "You're not the one with a file that reads like Finnegan's fucking Wake" is what I answered. No, that's a lie; finding myself incapable of speech, I actually just scissored my thighs apart, trapped his neck in an unforgiving viselike grip, and choked him until he turned the loveliest shade of periwinkle, to match his panicked, watering eyes.
No, that's a lie, too. It was an inverted facelock camel clutch.
The thing is, he is almost certainly right. Leaving aside normal variations in growth, the fact that the scan was done on different equipment by a different operator could easily lead to discrepancies that may sound significant to the patient — 30 percentile points! — but that are, in reality, mere clinical bagatelles.
Right?
At this point, my sense of when it is appropriate to worry is seriously skewed. Sometimes a headache is just a headache. Other times, it's a sign that your brain is about to ooze out of your ears if that baby doesn't come out now. (My head feels fine, thanks for asking.) Although Charlie was born at a great weight for his gestational age, the fact that my placenta showed marked signs of age — never normal in a preterm birth — and had an infarct showed that if he hadn't been born when he was, it's virtually certain that he would have begun to suffer from growth restriction. And that's the best case scenario. So even the faintest suggestion of slowed growth scares the busty Buscemi out of me.
Given all this, I have decided to permit myself a small ration of low-grade anxiety. The OB wants me to schedule a repeat scan for four weeks, pointing out that because of those normal variations, an earlier scan won't tell us much. I feel sure he would forgive me my skittishness if he remembered that it was he who neglected to request a protein dip at my 28-week appointment with Charlie, and he who gave me cheerful leave to travel. I don't blame him at all for failing to predict what happened, HELLP being what it is, but the association still makes me twitchy. Therefore I am keeping the appointment I'd already scheduled for two weeks from now with my MFM, who did the original scan — you remember, the one we were enjoying before the perfectly unobjectionable "Sugar, Sugar" went all SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWell, no wonder Tony Soprano shot him with a 12-gauge.
