Your Personal Practice Field

Let me begin this rant-y post by saying that overall I am very grateful for the care Thor and I are getting and especially for the fact that it's looking more and more like we are going to have the best possible outcome a baby with a CCAM can hope for. The CVR lately has been hovering around 1.9, but subjectively both Sarah, our favorite ultrasound tech, and Dr. Silver, the chair of the Maternal Fetal Medicine department, think that it looks like Thor's little heart has more room and the CCAM doesn't appear to be getting any bigger relative to his chest size. When I saw Dr. Silver last Thursday, he said he was "very pleased" with how things look. I was very pleased to hear that!

On the other hand...

I am getting sick of these dang appointments. Getting sick of them is probably a luxury of things going well, so take this all with a grain of salt. But still. Every time we go in we have an ultrasound tech scan us and then wait for a doctor to come and do the exact same thing. We usually have Sarah and now have gotten to the point where we are requesting Sarah because 1. she is head and shoulders above the other techs in terms of technique, 2. she has seen Thor so much, she would be the first to notice any changes, 3. she always prints out pictures of Thor for us, and 4. she is smart and kind and answers our questions intelligently. Plus she said she likes scanning us because we are so "well informed."

Sarah is really good at using the Doppler to find the ductus venosus to make sure the blood is flowing in the right direction. It's tricky because there's another vein/artery right there where blood is supposed to be flowing the other way, so if you accidentally pick up on the flow from that blood vessel, then it appears that blood is flowing the wrong way through the ductus venosus even though it's not. Anyway, if Thor is moving around at all (which he usually is), or if he's facing away from you, or if you're just plain not practiced at finding the ductus venosus, then it's really hard.

I know this because every time we go in, the doctor comes in after Sarah has scanned me and says, "Sarah got a pretty good picture of the ductus venosus, but I'm going to take a look too, if you don't mind."

No, no, go right ahead.

Then the doctor proceeds to scan me, which always takes much longer than when Sarah did it and never yeilds a better picture than what Sarah got. Plus most of the doctors press down really hard with the probe as if that somehow will compensate for them not being as good at it, or as if they're going to pin Thor down so that he won't be able to wriggle away from them. And everytime they're sitting there telling me, "Sarah's picture was good, I just want to see if I can get a better look." And I want to say, "Let me save you the trouble, you can't." I've also had a couple of them actually admit, "Okay, now it's like a personal challenge to see if I can do it."

At first I didn't mind the doctors practicing on me. I figured they need to practice on someone and I'm so used to it by now it doesn't bother me any more. But now it's getting to the point where I'm like, "Dude, I've been here for an hour and a half, my son is with a babysitter, my husband is taking time off of work, and the amount we're pay for parking just went up by two bucks so you could use me as your personal practice field."

Throughout my prenatal care with Isaac, his birth, my recovery, and now my high-risk care for Thor, Zach and my mom have been pressing me to stand up for myself and state what I need and want from my healthcare professionals. I think I am getting better at it, and so I think I'm going to start telling the docs, ever so delicately, that enough is enough! If we know from Sarah's scan that the blood flow looks good, let me go home and I'll see you again in three days!

Wish me luck and I'll let you know how it goes.