Though I've had a very healthy pregnancy with no complications, I've had occasion to become keenly aware of mundane medical facts that a non-gestational person would never even have to think about. Actually many of them are quite interesting and arise from totally ordinary situations.
For example, it's quite common to have a small fender bender with another car. Tom and I got rear-ended during...oh...my fifth month, I suppose. Tom was driving and I was in the passenger's seat. Though our rear bumper did sustain appreciable damage, the bump was so minor and at such a low speed that I didn't think twice about hustling to my next meeting on foot rather than being late for it, leaving Tom to deal with the offending driver and the police report. But after a couple of hours and some twinges of pain that were almost certainly from normal pregnancy tendon issues, I called the doctor just to be sure there was no need for me to come in after such a low speed accident. I was assured that, in fact, it is quite important that I come in right away for fetal monitoring and some bloodwork. Once I got to the doctor's office, I was then sent on to the hospital where Tom and I got way more than the standard free tour offered to couples who will have their babies at our hospital -- we got our very own "birthing suite" in which we sat for four hours with monitors strapped to my belly while waiting on bloodwork to determine whether the baby's blood had mixed with my blood. If I weren't some-blood-type-letter "negative", they would not have sent me to the hospital; so said my doctor when he stopped by our "suite" to check on me. I suppose somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain I knew the "positive" or "negative" part of someone's blood type meant something...and I suppose I must have figured whatever it meant would be nontrivial in some circumstances, but I had no idea what such circumstances would be. Obviously now I have one example. Of course we know the baby is completely fine, and this concludes the first hands-on medical lesson I got while pregnant.
I'm sure there have been many medical lessons between then and now, but another interesting one was just last week. I got a call from a friend of ours who has a young baby. She said she was giving me a courtesy call to find out whether I had held her baby recently, because if I had I should know he was diagnosed with Fifth Disease, and I might want to find out what the repercussions of that exposure would be for me. Well, I had held him and I indeed did want to find out about said repercussions! A quick search on google informed me that Fifth Disease is a minor viral infection which 40%-60% of adults have already had, and therefore are immune. The virus itself is parvovirus B19, related though not the same virus that causes parvo in dogs, and this disease cannot be spread from animals to humans or vice versa. Fifth Disease causes low fever and sometimes a rash. Though not dangerous for even young children or adults who get it, Fifth Disease can be dangerous for unborn babies because they can develop heart problems or anemia, which can even become fatal. Well naturally after reading this, it was another call to the doctor for me. They (of course) said I should come in for bloodwork. (As an aside, I am no longer a skeptic that being pregnant can improve one's anxiety over needles. See, there is often no warning that a pregnant woman's blood must be drawn, at possible penalty of her health or her baby's. After several such un-braced-for occurrences, the anxious mind probably has no other choice than to partly give up its adrenaline response to the idea of a needle stick -- sheerly out of self-preservation! But I digress.) I reported to the doctor for bloodwork, where the nurse explained that the test will tell whether I've had Fifth Disease before. Such a result is highly possible, she said, since many times people who are infected get better very quickly and never show any symptoms besides a very low fever. The test results came back in a couple of days, and they confirmed the presence of previous parvovirus antibodies in my blood, which leads to the conclusion that I have been exposed to the virus before and therefore my immune system is handily equipped to kill off the parvovirus invaders before they could even make their way to Rowan. Who knew?!
The most recent medical lesson I've had is about how to tell whether someone has a broken rib. Don't worry, it's not myself I was helping diagnose! But, not far from it. (I hope I tell the story accurately, Honey. But if not, that's the whole reason I set up this blog so you, my husband and Rowan's father, can post too! Will public taunting get you to write an entry? I won't hold my breath.) Anyway, here goes. Tom likes to ride his bike on the greenways near our house. Sometimes he goes off the paved path and explores, from what I understand, rugged wooded terrain. It's not really mountain, but more pseudo mountain biking. Off-road cycling? I don't know what you call it. One thing I am certain of, though: if you ever need a ticket to fly off your bike at risk of great physical harm, apparently Tom is your chaperone of choice. Last weekend a solo bike ride apparently saw him navigating challenging terrain at an unmanageable speed (can you imagine), and flying over the handlebars of his bike. After checking himself out to be sure he didn't need an ambulance (as if he could have gotten one anyway) he continued his ride. When he came in the house he was his normal sweaty, happy self and glowingly recounting the story of his mid-trail flight like it was the battle story of a proud warrior. After a few hours, he wasn't so glowing, and the last few days have seen sufficient groaning, moaning, whining, and other pitiful displays to drive us both to carefully read about the symptoms of broken versus bruised ribs. Well, his symptoms are clearly not in the "severe break" category, so he's taking reasonable measures of icing the area daily, taking Motrin or Tylenol occasionally if he's feeling particularly sore, and avoiding various activities that the preponderance of medical wisdom seems to say might prolong his recovery. So he'll certainly be fine, and my medical knowledge takes one more small step forward.
I'm thinking after a few years of motherhood (and heck, for that matter, continuing wife-hood), I'll be a veritable wealth of medical trivia.