To be honest, I probably should have opened with this one. But, me being me, I got excited and started rambling. I suppose that's the point of blogging tbh, to ramble about things that matter to me (and hopefully, to you). But it's not very helpful when it sends you off on a tangent and you forget what you're supposed to be doing!
The point of this blog is as a forum for mums to relate, discuss and learn about pregnancy, birth and beyond. Becoming a mum is the most incredibly rewarding thing that can ever happen to a woman but it does come with its challenges. Well, duh, I hear you say. However, what I found when I was pregnant -and I must add here that I was probably the most organised THEORETICAL pregnant lady in the world, i.e. I read EVERYTHING - is that there is an awful lot of stuff they don't tell you.
For example. I went for a routine checkup to my midwife at 26 weeks. No biggie, I was used to it by then. However, my midwife was on holiday so I got the locum. She had a feel of my bump and a listen to his heartbeat. Then she told me she thought she detected a slight murmur or second heartbeat.
This is where I started to panic. She told me that I would need to go back to the hospital for a third scan with the consultant (the 12-week and 20-week having shown no problems). She called the hospital and arranged for me to go in urgently the next morning. Then she showed me out the door.
Imagine what I felt! I had no information, didn't know what to expect, had no idea what this could mean. So I went home...and googled it. BIG MISTAKE. Immediately I got pages and pages of heart defects, operations on children etc. I cried. My brain went straight to worst-case-scenario and I started picturing my tiny baby boy in pain in a hospital bed. That was a very hard night to get through.
The next day we went to the hospital and saw the consultant. She was fantastic. She talked us through everything and explained that, in fact, 60% of babies are born with a slight heart murmur or the like and that 9 times out of 10 they heal themselves in the first year. Then she did the scan and found NOTHING. All that worrying for nothing. At my next appointment with my regular midwife, she went nuts at the locum because I'd been so frightened in her absence.
That is when I started thinking about writing a blog. I wish another mum had told me the night before that it was really common and would probably come to nothing.
So that's where you come in. If you went through something in pregnancy, birth or beyond where you wish someone could have just said 'it happened to me too - don't panic!' then please write in and let me know. Email middlingmum@gmail.com or post a comment and we'll get the word out there to women like us.
No comments:
Post a Comment