One way or another, we ended up seeing a lot of the baby before she was born. At the end of the twenty-week anatomy scan, after I had mentally relaxed upon noting all four chambers of a beating heart and a grinning skull with shadowy brain, the radiologist said that she thought my amniotic fluid was low. She mentioned it in passing, as if she’d just noticed that I had the beginnings of a cold.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’
She responded casually, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but you might want to mention it to your midwife next time you see her.’
‘OK,’ I thought, mentally noting to mention it, and then didn’t think too much more of it.
Cut to the next morning when I received a hurried call from my midwife, telling me to be at the hospital the next day. ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I thought it wasn’t anything to be too concerned about.
‘They need to check it out,’ said my midwife. ‘As I was already at the hospital when the results came through, I’ve managed to get you an appointment for tomorrow.’
With a third ‘oh’ to really showcase my witty repartee, I put the phone down and then quickly rang my husband to let him know what was going on.
‘Oh,’ he said. Then, ‘I thought the radiologist said it wasn’t anything serious?’
So I explained to him what little my midwife explained to me, and we agreed that we should go and get it checked out. Just to be on the safe side. Boy, was I going to get sick of that phrase before too long.
The next day, Friday, was the first in a long series of dates with the hospital radiology department. They decided to do the entire ultrasound again, so they could read off their own measurements as a baseline. And, let me just say, the taking of some of those measurements was a little more invasive than others.
It turned out that low fluid amniotic fluid - or Oligohydramnios - can have an impact on fetal development, and would require an ‘intervention’ (now that’s a euphemism and half!) to help ameliorate it. It also turned out that I didn’t have it. ‘Phew!’ we foolishly thought. ‘Everything’s OK for the moment then.’
‘Not so fast,’ they said (well, sort of). Having taken the baby’s measurements, they decided that she was on the small side. One of her head measurements was below the smallest percentile, and didn’t tally with the others.
‘Does it matter if her head is small?’ I asked. ‘That seems kinda good if I’m having to push a pumpkin out of me in a few months.’
‘Well, maybe we should keep an eye on her. We’ll have you back in a few weeks and take all the measurements again. Just to be on the safe side.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
We ended up having several more ultrasounds. Given that I didn’t seem to have the condition that we’d initially gone in for, we first thought we’d look on the bright side and enjoy the chance to have a few more blurry peeks at the baby. The novelty pretty soon wore off. She continued to have small head measurements, and they continued to call us back every few weeks for one thing and another. Just to be on the safe side.
We also asked to see copies of our records, with all the graphs and percentiles and so forth on them. I didn’t really understand them at first, but as we racked up about six graphs by the end of our visits, we could see the baby’s ‘normal’ development being plotted before our eyes. Our midwife took great delight in the fact that we had asked for copies. Most people don’t, and we had thrown the radiologists into a bit of a loop by wanting to see them.
In our last appointment, after checking that the placenta was where it was supposed to be - it was, but they managed not to notice that the cord was in the wrong place (a fun discovery during the birth) - a different radiologist took all her measurements again.
‘She’s going to be a big girl!’ he exclaimed.
‘What?’ we said, surprised. ‘We’ve been told all along that she’s going to be small.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, sounding very jolly. ‘Look how long her femur measurement is. She’s going to be very tall.’
‘Oh,’ we said.
We had a final meeting with the consultant before we were discharged. He seemed relaxed about her size - small or large - and told us about a baby he’d seen with a huge head. Apparently, that baby’s Plunket nurse had called in the doctor because she was concerned that his head was above the top percentile. I’m not sure what condition that might indicate, but the baby was checked out. Just to be on the safe side. Now the nurse had only met this baby with his mother, but the whole family turned out to meet the doctor, including the baby’s father. The doctor walked in, took one look at the baby, and one look at his father, and said ‘The baby’s got a big head? Well, he’s got a huge head!’
After listening to a few more jokes, we were free to go. I felt curiously relieved. Even though nothing had really seemed that wrong, I realised that I’d been feeling a low level of anxiety over the weeks that I was prodded and measured. Once we were in the system, it was hard to get out. By the end of it, I certainly had a deeper appreciation of why some women choose home births. As pleasant and thorough as the consultant and the radiologists had been, it was hard not to feel like an object, one who was being measured, graphed, categorised, labelled and treated according to a pre-determined criteria of which I had little knowledge.
The experience called to mind Michel de Certeau’s comparison of the development of history with that of medicine:
Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language. The latter always remains to be decoded.
Certeau describes both history and medicine as ‘heterologies’ or discourses of the other. When it was professionalised in the nineteenth century, medicine was an overwhelmingly male preserve, which, as I have mentioned in a previous post, marginalised the predominantly female care of pregnant women by midwives. In obstetric care, the literate subject was the male doctor, the object, the pregnant woman. Of course, medicine is not as male-dominated as it was then, and most health professionals attend more solicitously to their patients, but, at times like this, the power relation becomes apparent. Thankfully, it turned out that when this object was decoded, it had nothing of much interest to say.
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