Your mileage may vary.
The day I found out, Joe had arrived home after a 10 day work trip back to the States.
“Zwanger” means pregnant, right? I texted him at lunchtime along with a picture of two blue lines.
It never occurred to me to use Google Translate to figure out the Dutch and French instructions. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I needed to take a test. Until it did.
Neato! His reply needed no interpretation.
Mouse print
noun, jargon
The fine print found within advertisements telling consumers the details, usually positioned as a few small lines at the bottom of the ad.
…
My first real job in advertising — the one that came with health insurance and a mostly livable wage — was on an automotive account. One of my duties was to make sure that dealerships followed brand guidelines and correctly included all the necessary fine print on their co-op ads. It often took several rounds to get everything right. And it wasn’t uncommon for dealers to take out their frustrations on me and the two colleagues who shared the lowest rung of the account’s ladder. I was just glad that my territory was Chicago and westward. The East Coast dealers could be brutal.
On approved credit. Price does not include tax, title or license. Your mileage may vary…
Foreign Service families have to choose to deliver babies at post or “babyvac” to the States or another medevac point. Oftentimes, a personal and nuanced algebraic formula filled with variables like medical care and familial support is calculated. But in some cases it’s almost an easy choice — prenatal care or NICU support simply isn’t adequate or even available at post. (Then again, what’s easy about a choice involving a long haul flight in the last months of pregnancy and hoping that one’s partner will follow in enough time to be present for the birth? What’s easy about a course that often requires making the same trip in reverse alone with a newborn?)
It was never a question for Joe and me that I would stay here to deliver. Brussels has great healthcare, including a team I had already started assembling. Plus, we don’t really have a home in the States — we use my in-laws’ house as our “home leave" location and my folks were planning an interstate move within two weeks of my due date. And besides that, our house here is our home; it’s where we’ve set up the baby’s nursery, it’s where all of our things are, it’s where we live.
I happily signed the required waiver acknowledging that I understood the risks of staying in Brussels to deliver and wouldn’t sue if things went pear-shaped.
Like many upper midwestern grandparents, mine kept a popup camper on the side of the house. It was sometimes used for weekend camping trips but mostly for overflow accommodations when all the cousins came to stay.
I can’t remember which summer it was that found me devouring all of my grandma’s Red Cross First Responder Training materials. 5th grade? 6th?
The camper’s slim mattresses and the semi-cool breeze flowing through it made for a comfortable reading nook as I taught myself everything I might need to know about how to save a life. (Or maybe just deliver a baby.)
I’ve found no shortage of pregnancy and labor & delivery advice since I made my condition public — solicited or not, stumbled upon or sought after, useful or useless...
But finding advice that fit my circumstances proved harder than I imagined it would. Friends back home had American OB and hospital experiences. So did all the blog posts I found on Pinterest. Even an online forum for Foreign Service families with babies and small children is only so relevant depending on where the commenter is currently serving or has served. And the resources from the local English-speaking-expat babies & small child group were filled with lots of information that simply didn’t apply to a diplomat’s wife.
It’s not that I haven’t been (mostly) grateful for what’s been on offer. I really have. It’s just that I’ve often been frustrated by the feeling that my mileage would always vary.
Risk and emotion are oftentimes intertwined. The brain makes a fast assessment of the odds, but when the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in emotions, emotional behavior and motivation, is flooded with adrenaline, it clouds our ability to rationally assess probability. According to Paul Slovic, Ph.D. & President of Decision Research, “This is the way our ancestors evaluated risk before we had statistics.”*
By the time my OB suggested a pre-delivery consultation with anesthesiology to discuss the hardware that lives in my back after a lumbar fusion, I had already all but made up my mind that I probably wasn’t going to ask for an epidural.
My sister-in-law and (doctor) brother-in-law have two kids of their own and had recommended a book written by an economist looking at all sorts of “risky” pregnancy things (like sushi, soft cheese, coffee, episiotomies, and epidurals). And while I was willing to throw a ridiculous overabundance of caution to the wind on most things, Expecting Better helped me figure out that the epidural pros likely didn’t outweigh the potential cons for me.
Whether or not I wanted to get an epidural ended up being a moot point. After a slightly frustrating 10 minute encounter, the anesthesiologist bluntly told me on Valentine’s Day that an epidural would be next to impossible and that I’d need to be fully put under for a Cesarean. The news about the epidural wasn’t unexpected but the idea of having our son under general anesthesia without my husband in the room to greet him shook me. Especially after I went home and read that delivering under general can lead to a 4x risk of can’t intubate, can’t ventilate scenarios. It didn’t help that Joe was away on another business trip and not at home to ask me “4x what, exactly?” (Humans are bad at calculating risk…)
I called my mom in the middle of my night to talk through my fears. I called my nurse friend the next day to cry-talk it out again. And I made an appointment with the embassy’s health unit practitioner to discuss whether my decision to stay was still a good one. (We decided that it was.)
The anesthesiologist would later change his recommendation to include a spinal block for a C-section but not until I’d spent two weeks wrapping my head around what might happen if a vaginal delivery simply wasn’t possible.
YMMV
slang
Lit. "your mileage may vary.” Often used in internet forums to convey that individual results may differ from the original poster’s.
I wonder if every expecting mother is asked what her birth plan is by people who wouldn’t normally feel comfortable asking such intimate questions.
Luckily, I’m not one to feel embarrassed often or hold back on sharing. And I have to admit that I was probably taking just a little bit too much delight in seeing reactions when I outlined my ridiculously simple birth plan:
Enter the hospital pregnant.
Leave the hospital no longer pregnant and with a newborn. Preferably my own.
It is OK to feel all of [these] feelings…If you don’t name what you’re feeling, if you don’t own the feelings, and feel them, they will eat you alive.
— Brené Brown, Ph.D, L.M.S.W. on the Unlocking Us podcast
At my last midwife appointment, the hand sanitizer holders in the exam rooms had been rigged to prevent thefts. And, in between listening to the baby’s (strong and steady) heartbeat and swabbing to see if I’m positive for Group B Strep, we talked about Covid-19 being clearly at Belgium’s doorstep.
Social restriction measures were announced by the government that evening.
The WhatsApp group of expecting parents from our prenatal class celebrated “our” first baby’s birth the next day. We also shared what we knew about the precautions that different hospitals are taking — such as limiting L&D support to partners only while excluding doulas and kinés that may have otherwise joined. A woman from Portugal noted that some hospitals in her home country have even restricted L&D rooms to the mother and the medical team.
For the past two weeks, I have been running the worst case scenarios I can bare to fathom:
Joe will not be able to join me in the delivery room and I’ll deliver our son by myself with a limited medical team.
The hospitals will be overwhelmed and/or unsafe and I will deliver at home with Joe’s help.
Realistically speaking, the first scenario has a less than minuscule chance of coming true. The second is so unlikely it’s almost not worth planning for. Still, it calms me down to think through it, visualize what might happen, get myself ready for the possibility, and be comforted by the fact that Joe’s EMT training materials live on our bookshelf.
The fact of the matter is this: there is no class or book or blog post or friend’s anecdote that will have prepared me for giving birth in a pandemic.
Then again, every birth — since the beginning of time — has come with its own set of unique circumstances.
Mileage always varies.
*Source: “Why are humans bad at calculating risk?” Cogency Medical
