Wednesday, February 11, 2009

You would laugh too if it could never happen to you

Few days ago I paid a visit to my gyn. While waiting for him in the exam room and lacking other reading materials, I grabbed a pregnancy magazine. Well, here’s a bit of history. While expecting DS, I had a blog on one of those pregnancy sites. Several posts there were dedicated to pregnancy magazines, mainly about what kind of an idiot who thought that it was a good idea to print some of the stuff in a publication read primarily by - duh! - expectant mothers. So pregnancy magazines and I don’t have a good relationship, but still, I would rather read them than examine a chart with birth control options posted on the exam room door (not because I am against birth control, but because I have it memorized already. I don’t think it changed since I was pregnant with DD, who is now 4, and I spent many hours staring at that door in the past 5 years.)

So I opened this magazine, and the first thing I saw was a “fun fact.” Oh, nice, fun AND not written by Heidi Murkoff. Too good to be true? It was. This fun fact contained the following information: during pregnancy woman’s uterus stretches to over 1000 times its original size. Yippee! As in ouch!!!! Good for us, women, I guess. I instinctively cringed and crossed my legs. Who in their right mind (people in medical profession excluding) thinks that having your uterus stretch is “fun”? Have they ever been pregnant? Did someone, whose uterus will never stretch, aka “a man”, write this? What other fun facts does this fine magazine have up its sleeve? That when uterus shrinks back to its original (??) size, it is quite painful?That there is no cure for stretch marks, except plastic surgery? Or that about 30% of pregnant women will end up with a C-section?

Well, here’s another fun fact. Right after reading this, my eyes immediately returned to the aforementioned birth control options chart. Was this the writer’s intent?

16 comments:

  1. ROFL! You forgot, my friend, that your truly posesses a very extensive and varied library, plus I have subscriptions to magazines that have nothing to do with scaring preggies:)

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  2. Please don't tell me you wrote that fun fact ;)

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  3. Lol.
    On a different note, when I was pregnant, I used to watch pple giving birth on Youtube (beats me why they would want to put those up, but...) and read my husband's medical books. But then, my husband already knew I wasn't normal.

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  4. Yeah, you are definitely not normal. Me either, but I fall on the other end of the normalcy spectrum. During the last two months of my first pregnancy, I was strongly advised by my husband not to speak to several people because after every enlightening conversation with them, I turned into a sobbing heap for hours. I was also strongly advised by my friend, the last year medical student, to stop watching Lamaze DVD (I couldn't make it to class for various reasons). To my sobbing, "But the doctors and the books say that one should be informed," she replied, "Not you."

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  5. LOL, in any case, normalcy is so overrated.

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  6. You wound me; I would not be so cruel:) (to guys maybe, but not to women) And yes, normalcy is overrated; but that also depands on what constitutes normal

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  7. On the other hand, the one story guaranteed to scare the heck out of me was the one about the woman who gave birth on the sidewalk/in the hospital elevator/in her living room/on her lawn/in her husband's friend's car - resulting in my arriving at the hospital half a day early and refusing to leave.

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  8. Barb, wanna write an article for Maxim about testicular torsion?

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  9. Thanks, Dina, I'll pass:) My blog is enough entertainment for me; maybe next time.

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  10. Was I one of the "people" you were advised not to speak to during your pregnancy, Sub?

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  11. No, there were only two, I think. One of them is someone we both know, so I will withhold the details. She had a particular enjoyment in sharing all the horror stories she ever heard under the guise of trying to help me and keep me informed. Another person was a co-worker. But you weren't one of the blacklisted people, no. As a matter of fact, no one who reads this blog regularly was blacklisted.

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  12. I was so pissed off they didn't let me watch the actual c-section.

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  13. Yep
    Though they did let me cut the cord this time and while I was standing next to the baby, I had a nice opportunity to check out how they were sewing her up.
    The pediatrician, very weird guy. Calls me over, points to the clamp and just says "press". I do that, then he hand me the scissors, which don't look like normal scissors. Then he just looks at me, doesn't say a word, just gives them to me and looks at me. I was like "huh?" I opened them, saw they were scissors and cut. The guy was white and like 60 or 70.

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  14. It's still beyond me why someone might want to see this. (shivers down the spine). Want to borrow my Lamaze DVD? Don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question, I think I already burned it or gave it away.

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  15. Sux
    At least I still have google video...

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