Maybe the Thai's have got something right about this pregnancy lark.
I find myself once again in the early weeks of pregnancy. This is the 4th time and of course there is a lot of trepidation. But this time I am doing things a little differently, I'm doing it Thai style.
My doctor, at the moment, is Dr Somsri (Bumrungrad). She specialises in high risk pregnancies, she is very chilled (for a doctor), she smiles and laughs and talks about her family (even when you would prefer to be talking about your expanding family) but she is lovely and her English is excellent, and she even has a dose of empathy and cultural understanding.
But Thai doctors, and therefore Thai people, can be a bit worrisome and tend to air on the side of caution, with basic advice amounting to "don't move", 'don't think' and forget about having anymore fun.
As with the previous non viable pregnancies I was planning on toughing it out as I meant to go on...this baby has to fit into my regime, not the other way around, and it might as well start now. Especially after having our first scan (6 weeks and 1 day) and finding a good heartbeat, and that for the first time I had some mild morning sickness which is the one thing that has probably made me the happiest for months and months...at last, maybe, hopefully, I am having a normal, healthy pregnancy.
But then it happened.....
That dreaded little drop of blood on the toilet paper (that toilet paper that all us TTC women are now so accustomed to studying in more detail than a mother looking for lice after an outbreak at nursery school). We were about to fly to Singapore the same day for a fun filled (now sober) weekend with friends and I didn't know what to do, less than 24 hours earlier I had seen my babies heartbeat, could it have gone so horribly wrong so quickly????
I called Dr Somsri and her advice was effectively "don't move", 'don't think' and forget about having anymore fun. She doubled my dose of Progesterone, but told me not to worry and scheduled me for a scan in 7 days, she also told me not to fly and that I should move as little as possible and have bed rest, I guess in this type of situation gravity definitely isn't your friend.
I have been finding it hard to focus on work, and to be honest my boss is a prick, plus the nausea and cramping had been genuinely getting a little worse, so for the first time ever it was easy for me to follow doctors orders, and I am currently on a full weeks sick leave doing nothing but lying down and watching TV box sets.
For the first few days I was genuinely worried. I don't know if it was mind over matter but my cramps and nausea were getting much worse, and the cramping was really worrying me. 3 days in and I tried to sit up to type some emails and 30 mins finished me off and gave me every justification I needed to lie back down and finish Season 6 of Game of Thrones.
I'm now 6 days in to doing not much at all (with 2 days until our next scan) and I am starting to feel less worried, although even a walk to the toilet seems to set off unexpected cramps and once again provides me with all of the justification I need to sit back down on my arse and stretch out with a warm hot water bottle.
I still feel like a fraud though. I've watched most of my friends battle their way through early pregnancy as if it was nothing more than a hangover, seeing them prep themselves for the real shit that happens after 9 months, when they will have no excuses or time to think about themselves. And here I am, lying on the sofa, now working my way through every episode of The Wire (because I missed the hype the first time round).
But, this is my 4th chance, and I don't want to mess this one up. I do want to be able to look back and think that I did anything wrong, I want to start putting my baby first, to get used to the idea that life is no longer about me and instead is about protecting something innocent.
So here I am, being and thinking like a mum for the first time ever. Work is almost out of my mind, the condo is tidier, dinner is prepared on time and I've even made ice cream and baked a cake...this shit is getting real and I want it to keep getting "real".
I want as much "real" as humanly possible, so I'm gonna chill and I'm gonna chill and I'm gonna chill some more, because I'm in Thailand, because I am lucky, because I have worked hard up until now to make some of that luck, and because I can....and because it's how the Thai's do it.
