Email That I Just Composed and Sent to author Jodi Picoult

Dear Ms. Picoult,

I am writing today because I have been reading your book Handle with Care. Although I generally like the book for many reasons (including your writing style, etc), I just have to speak up on one 'little' aspect that I have a problem with.

Here is the portion from page 11:
"He's a resident," she said. . . "He doesn't know the way to the cafeteria yet, much less the protocol for talking to a mother who's just watched her baby suffer a full cardiac arrest in front of her eyes."

This pushes on and on the idea that some people have that Residents are quite useless and not ever good enough. Granted, this MAY be true in a percentage of cases, but not true in ALL cases! I take a bit of offense to this from two directions:

1) As the mother of a little baby boy who is now an angel, I learned how to deal with all of the doctors from interns to the most senior attending in our son's case. I found that the majority of the Residents and Fellows - if they didn't know an answer to a question (and we asked lots, and often) - were generally willing to work/ask to find a reasonable answer to our questions. Our son was born with multiple heart, vein, and lung defects (and we did know about the main heart defect at the 20 week ultrasound, but we opted to continue the pregnancy, hoping that multiple heart surgeries would allow him to live a good life - we did not know about all of the other problems until after well after he was born, and could not get off of the ventilator.). We lived with him in the hospital for nearly four months after he was born, and were there with him when he died.

2) My husband started his own medical Residency a mere three months after our son died. He is one Resident who does in fact know what it's like to watch his own baby in cardiac arrest - more than once, too - and to watch his baby die. This experience has changed greatly how, as a doctor, he responds to patients, and to the family and friends of patients of all ages - because he has been there, on the other side.

Thank you for allowing me to email you with my concerns and defense of some Resident doctors. Yes, they are still learning, but people need to keep in mind that some of them do have life experiences of their own, and might actually know some things. . .

Thanks,

Heartbeat at 10 weeks

Two days ago, I had a quick "dating" ultrasound, at about 10 weeks along. The baby was the right size for gestational age for LMP, and most importantly, I saw the heart beating! I also heard the heart beat. In fact, I recorded it on my digital camera as video, since my husband couldn't be at the appointment. I cried.

We still don't know, of course, though, if the baby is heart-healthy. The baby's heart rate was 194 bpm - I worried that was too fast, but it's not, for that gestational age. I don't think Sam's heartrate was that high at that age, but I don't remember if they even told us Sam's heartrate at the 10 weeks ultrasound! It's not printed on his ultrasound pictures, either. So. . . we'll just have to wait.

I am still all-day sick. I am at least 10 lbs down from where I was 2 months ago. I do not really have a baby belly yet, and my clothes are all loose on me!

9 Weeks

1)I have had a cold (I think), and was miserable for two days. I took nothing for it - not even regular acetaminophen.

2) Even with all the sneezing, etc, still nearly constantly nauseous. This morning as I type this, I am lying on my side and chewing gum - and still fighting the urge to vomit imminently.

3) Night after night lately, I've been sleeping for hours on end. No waking up from weird dreams, nothing. Then this last night, I was so tired that I couldn't keep my eyes open, but I couldn't fully sleep either. In the middle of the night I was panicking because I had some insomnia the night before I started miscarrying in December. I finally got up around 4 am, got online, found that 78% of pregnant women experience periods of insomnia. That helped to relieve me a bit, and I also figured out I was too hot most of the night, too, as my husband had re-set the thermostat after I had already gone to bed! (He thought it was too cold! The colder it is the better I sleep.) Anyway, I am also relieved that I am still nauseous, too.

4) According to some of the pregnancy development sites, given that this is my second pregnancy (third, but second to get this far), I should be popping a belly already! No, my clothes still fit extremely nicely given that I am still down several pounds from pre-pregnancy. I am occasionally very bloated, which is very normal, but nothing to change the way my clothes fit.

5) My next OB appt is on Tuesday, and my first ultrasound is on Thursday next week.

6) I was getting frustrated by being told no, no fetal echo until 18 weeks. I have argued that I know it can be done earlier - at least to detect HLHS! They can detect HLHS as early as 12 weeks in Europe!! So I looked up Sam's team's website - and yes, they do offer fetal echoes for as early as 15 weeks along w/history of CHD. http://www.thic.com/fetalechocard.htm My dear husband asked today at the local hospital where he works, and they are willing to do a fetal echo at 16 weeks. This is fine - this is all I was asking for. They do need a referral from my OB, however. I'll get one, one way or another.

7) Still craving potatoes.

Potatoes

I am craving potatoes. . . and specifically, mashed potatoes. That's okay, for right now. As of yesterday, I'd lost a few more pounds, due to my general inability to eat lately. I never really craved potatoes with Samnini. I kept my mashed potatoes down last night, and I just had a whole bunch a few minutes ago. Maybe my body needs the nutrients contained in potatoes. Also, for me, it's also the texture and the comfort food aspect. (I am also craving pizza with wheat-containing crust, tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni - all things I am allergic to!)

And so it continues. . .

Since I last posted, I have actually thrown up a number of times, including dry-heaving. It has not been pleasant. I've officially thrown up more times now during this pregnancy than I ever did during my pregnancy with Sam.

I've made it through part of the training for my new job, which I am pleased about. I felt queasy most of the time, but I made it.

My breasts are very sore and full. I can still wear my same bras, but just barely.

I am not convinced that vitamin B-6 really helps the nausea.

I hope that all of this nausea means the baby is healthy. . .

A Description of "morning" sickness. . .

As a child and even now as an adult, I loved the Little House books. I must admit that I did not like The First Four Years for many years. However, that has changed. I think more portions of is are more appreciated by an adult than an 8 or 9 year old child. In it, Laura remembers that her mother always said, "They that dance must pay the fiddler" (page 45). I never really understood this when I was a kid. Something else that I still don't understand is why they did not name their precious baby boy who died. He deserved a name even if he was apparently sickly at birth. I know, I know. . . thinking was different back then. . . but still.

Here is a quote from Laura's pregnancy with Rose:

"Watching the plump wheat kernels slide into the open mouth of the sack made Laura dizzy. If she took her eyes from them, they were drawn irresistibly to the newspapers pasted on the shanty walls and she read the words over and over. She was unreasonably annoyed because some of them were bottom side up but she read them anyway. She couldn't take her eyes from them. Words! Words! The world was full of words and sliding wheat kernels!

And then she heard Manly saying, "Sit down a minute! You're tired."

So she sat down, but she was not tired. She was sick. The next morning she felt much worse and Manly got his own breakfast.

For days she fainted whenever she left her bed. The doctor told her to lie quietly. He assured her she would feel much better before long and that in a few months, nine to be exact, she would be quite all right. Laura was going to have a baby." (Pages 45-6)

Interesting Report/Article on Morning Sickness

So, I found a report on Baby Center about how mothers who had morning sickness had babies that are smarter than babies whose mothers did not experience morning sickness. This research was reported in Journal of Pediatrics, and apparently the research took place with the Motherisk Program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto . . . I'll have my husband look it up on his medical database. In the meantime, this report also says "Pregnant women who have morning sickness are less likely to have a miscarriage and less likely to have babies with congenital cardiovascular problems."

Yeah, right. I had major all-day sickness with Sam (although it started a little later than it did for my current pregnancy, and maybe wasn't quite as bad as what I am experiencing right now - I thought it was bad at the time). . . and I would say that Sam had some major congenital cardiovascular problems!!

(I have no idea why the link will not show up! I've tried something like eight times!)

http://www.babycenter.com/204_morning-sickness-linked-to-smarter-babies_10312743.bc

Found gluten-free pregnancy blogs. . .

I just found a gluten-free pregnancy blog, that so far I find quite interesting. She even presents the idea of adding pureed fruit or vegetables to Trader Joes' Gluten-Free Brownie Mix (which I've tried once and loved. . . I could definitely add sweet potato, etc, to that brownie mix. I already add it to the pancake mix!)

http://glutenfreepregnancy.blogspot.com/

At least I don't have to run into the "saltine advice" on this blog. . . oof, when I actually did eat saltines during my pregnancy with Sam, I threw them up. Since then, I had trouble even looking at them again (and for most of my life, I refused to eat soup without saltines. . . not a problem, anymore.) Now that it has been shown that I am allergic to wheat (and oats), and trying to maintain a gluten-free diet, this website looks quite helpful . . . except for the entry on eating banana! I am also allergic to bananas, so that suggestion is rather unhelpful. Ah, well, the rest is decent!

One potential issue about this blog is that it does not appear to have been updated in at least a year.

I also found out that Shauna James Ahern who wrote Gluten-Free Girl was pregnant last year, and here is a link to a very long post:
http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com/2008/07/gluten-free-pregnancy.html

Nicknames

When I was first pregnant with who turned out to be Sam, I started calling the tiny being growing inside of me "Niniboof". 'Nini' (pronounced NEE-NEE, not "ninny" or NII-nee)is a Persian term for 'baby'. Boof is a childish, perhaps silly, term for rice in persian. My husband kept saying at the time very early in pregnancy that the baby wasn't much bigger than a grain of rice, and then Niniboof just popped into mind. Later into pregnancy, when we'd figured out Sam's name, we started calling him Samnini.

So, we've already decided on a nickname for this little one. "Ninibaa" is our choice this time around. Baa - for a little lamb. In Persian, a term for lamb is "baa-by-ee".

So as I am writing this, I am waiting for my backup data to load back onto my laptop (I had to completely wipe the whole drive -- it had problems.) I am also resisting the urger to run to the bathroom to throw up. All-day sickness continues!