Two Words You Don’t Want To Hear In The Same Sentence

My midwife called me 30 minutes before my appointment yesterday morning.

I had one leg in my shorts and the other in the air, The Poo was yelling about wanting to paint, and I had to skip my shower because we were running late.

Did I mention it was 8:45 a.m.?

She asked me if the perinatologist had called yet, about putting me on insulin. I said no, and saying I was annoyed that she was asking me this question when I was going to see her in a half-hour is putting it mildly.

Then she said this:

“Your due date is August 15, right?”

“Umm, yesssss,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, the doc has to go out of town from the seventh to the ninth,” she said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So we have to reschedule your c-section.”

I dropped my toothbrush in the sink and started to pay attention.

Turns out my doc – who I’ve seen exactly once and who gave me contradictory information about my diabetes – has to be out of town for a deposition.

If there are two words in the English language that don’t go together when you are six weeks from having your belly sliced open to extract your child, they are “OB” and “deposition.”

My sister assures me that all doctors get sued, but this is combined with the fact that this afternoon a trusted friend and local doula told me my midwife hates her job because she doesn’t enjoy working for “an insane person.”

Um? That insane person?

THAT IS MY DOCTOR. THE ONE WHO IS ALSO BEING SUED.

I probably over-reacted, but I was pissed and I told my midwife exactly that at my appointment. I wanted that date (08-08-08) and we have five people coming into town for the birth.

And honestly? This has been a hard pregnancy for me. The diabeetus has been tough, and now I am starting to throw ketones, which means I am basically starving myself.

I am very anemic and if my iron falls another another decimal, I’m look at a post-surgery transfusion.

I have a pain in my upper right chest that is excruciating. I can’t walk because my hooha hurts. I can’t breathe, or sleep or even eat a fucking slice of watermelon without getting heartburn so bad it makes me want to cry.

Today I had to buy EXTRA LARGE SHORTS for my EXTRA LARGE ASS.

I’m D-O-N-E. I want this pregnancy over sooner rather than later. Granted, they only want to push my date forward to the 11th, but still.

That is two more days of misery.

More than that, though, is that I am feeling out of control.

I don’t want to have this baby so far from home. In the next 18 months we will adjust to being a family of four, my husband will have to finish his dissertation, and we will have to put our house for sale and move.

Again. Moving here was not my decision, not by a long shot. My husband chose this school, and so we had to live in this town. I was his hostage to fortune.

He’ll tell you that if the opportunity came for me to move somewhere for my dreams, he would drop everything and we’d go. That’s very convenient for him to say, because, frankly, the odds of me landing a job at The New York Times or The Boston Globe ended the day I tendered my resignation from the small-town newspaper I worked at for five years.

And you know what? We have to go where the job is, whether that is back home, Alaska, North Dakota, Michigan, L.A., or Bumblefuck, Georgia.

The one thing, the one single thing I was able to control was the date of my c-section.

I know that sounds so silly. However, I have had enough therapy am self-aware enough to know that, in the end, I feel like I need to be able to control something, just this one little thing.

I can’t even have that.

My midwife is wonderful, and she asked the doctor’s secretary to call the lawyer and try to re-arrange the date of the deposition. She listened to me rant, didn’t laugh when I got teary, and made sure I felt like she understood that I was disappointed, and, most important, why I was disappointed.

So it’s looking like the 11th, instead of my hoped-for lucky day.

Oh, well. Silver lining? Maybe my FIL won’t be able to make it.