No woman looks forward to her annual exam with her doctor. It is a very awkward exam with cold instruments and uneasy conversations about your sex life that makes it seem like your partner is an evil person that you have to defend.
It was my first time seeing this doctor in a long time. I had been seeing the prenatal department and then I just stopped going to the doctor's office for a year. I told my self that there would be no tears. It was already going to be weird. Something about the being naked in a strange place and a person that you are not used to seeing you just made the experience uneasy to begin with. I thought that there would be some research into my medical history I knew from the first question the doctor asked me that she had no idea about my medical history.
I see that you were in the prenatal program and gave birth a year ago. Are you still nursing?
What was my response supposed to be. I started to cry and at the same time explain that my daughter only lived two days. I am pretty sure she was fed through her IV. There I am sitting on the examination table, wearing nothing but a hospital gown. I tried to save some dignity and explain my story.
The rest of the exam happened as normal. I was able to calm down. I really wanted to focus the conversation on trying to conceive. At my post postpartum appointment I was asked to wait a year so I could be more emotionally ready. Instead of talking about my condition, she insisted that I needed to grieve and grow more as a person.
My only answer to her saying that I need more time to grieve, I spent a year learning that I will never be the same person I was before I gave birth to my beautiful daughter. I came to terms with the fact that I was the one who made the decision to let her die instead of living in pain just to die in her sleep after living on morphine. It is not fair to ask a mother to grow more as a person. I personally think she did not know how to handle my situation. I have a condition that very little is known about, and every reference to it says very little.
We spoke for a breif moment about my condition. I have what is known as an incompetent cervix. I had a healthy pregnancy, but my cervix could not hold a baby. I felt like she was dropping or kicking down instead of her normal spot on my belly button. Then the next day I lost my mucus plug and went into the hospital. At 24 weeks 0 days I was 3 cm dilated. I gave birth 3 days later.
I was asked by this doctor if I felt that what I had was an incompetent cervix. I went to school for law, not medicine. I have to be able to trust what the doctor says. If she has no idea what is going wrong with me, than maybe I need to switch doctors.
