Back, With A Brand New Attitude

 Just kidding. No attitude adjustments happening here!

But, I am back after about five months, with...a new set of complicated, hard things. Also there are some really good things! But no one needs to journal about those.

A warp-speed fill-in: it turns out I ended up getting pregnant really soon after those last posts. About two weeks later, to be exact, which means that I was technically writing them at the verrrrry beginning of the pregnancy, since pregnancy is counted from when your cycle begins, not from the date of conception. I feel like I should find some sort of meaning in that, but it feels very trite. "Sometimes what you're looking for is just around the corner!" - Okay, and sometimes it's not. You can't know in the moment, and feelings are very real as they happen. It seems stupid to try and force them away.

Anyway. I got pregnant, fairly unexpectedly because we thought I wasn't ovulating. But I guess I did, randomly! (This mysteriousness of my body's own processes I think may also contribute to some of the anxiety I write about below.) I did a pregnancy test the morning before a follow-up appointment with my doctor to try and figure out why I wasn't ovulating, "just to be sure I wasn't pregnant," and then spent a good 15 minutes staring blankly into the 6:30 AM darkness as my partner snored beside me. 

It took me a long time to feel like it was real, a feeling I still to some degree struggle with even at 20 weeks, as scan after scan has been normal and I can now sporadically feel this being moving inside me. I have to say I LOVE the kicks, and I'm really into my growing belly. They feel like confirmation that all is well, in a way that no doctor or test can really ever provide. You do you, little monster.

But this isn't a place to write about what I love, about what is easy. It's a place I come to say shit that I need to process and have trouble saying to anyone else. So. In tandem with all the "good" signs, what seems to be happening is that this pregnancy is dredging up allllll of my health anxieties rooted in past traumas (most centrally, my mom's lack of comfort with her body and sudden death from cancer). And, these seem to be manifesting clinically. 

Or at least that's the best I can make out about why I seem to have (somewhat) high blood pressure. Not the "gestational" kind, the kind that lots of healthy women I know have had, that creeps in during the third trimester and means that maybe you have to deliver a couple weeks early. No, mine has been high since the beginning. Again, it's not drastically high, and my regular OB seems to think that things are probably fine. But the occasion for writing this post is that last week at my anatomy ultrasound, after being warned at the 12-week that this might happen, the maternal-fetal medicine doctor decided that I need to be on the "you have high blood pressure so we're giving you extra ultrasounds" track. "Chronic" high blood pressure, as it's called. "Even though we think it's white coat related, we can't prove that." She was kinder and more reassuring than at 12 weeks--I suspect that my regular OB had written a note in my chart telling her essentially to tone it down, I'm an anxious bb--but honestly it came off as condescending. The likelihood of complications is low, she says. "Just think of it as a few extra pictures of your baby." Okay. Okay. 

Except you know what? No, fuck you, I can't. Because whether this individual doctor intends it or not, we live in a society that is so incredibly, insidiously judgmental about this kind of thing. People with high blood pressure "aren't taking care of themselves," are irresponsible, lazy, and just overall stigmatized. I feel ashamed and embarrassed about it; I don't feel like I can tell other people. Or at least, if I do, I feel an irresistable urge to immediately shout, "but I dunno why because I work out and eat a reasonably healthy diet ahahahaha!!!" Or to make it really clear that (we think) this is about anxiety. But even then, there's an air of shame. "You should really work to let go of the guilt," the websites say. "It's only making the problem worse." 

I realize I'm almost certainly getting less shit from the doctors, let alone the rest of society, because I'm thin and white and upper-middle-class and people are primed to believe I'm following all the "good" habits. But it's incredible how swiftly the shadow of stigma can sweep across an interaction. "Yeah, I mean my blood pressure wasn't high at 20 weeks," says a friend who ended up with preeclampsia, with what feels like an unspoken addendum of, "yikes, I'm glad I'm not you." I can't decide if I feel angry at the system for telling me that there's a problem when I otherwise feel fine, or upset and ashamed about my body for what feels like letting me down. I guess it's some of both.

Regardless, what it feels like when I'm in those appointments or replay them back in my head is that I'm being told that my body is defective--and, subtly, that it's somehow my fault. The wonderful podcast Maintenance Phase sometimes talks about how we shouldn't link health and morality, but our society very frequently does. I've started to think about that a lot. And even though, again, I get a TON of esteem points as this thin, sympathetic white lady, the feeling of unspoken blame is so powerful. Wow, a thin girl like you is having these problems? You must be really bad. There must be something really, really wrong with you! ...Which, you know, is definitely not, like, a trigger for my anxiety or anything.

Anyway. I'm now dreading my glucose test for gestational diabetes at ~26 weeks even more than I was before. The prospect of potentially having another condition that the system stigmatizes is just...ugh. Plus I love cake, duh!!! (I mean, I don't really have any reason to believe I do/will have GD, other than the fact that my grandmother had type II diabetes, but I think because of that family history it's been something I've been something I've become hyper-aware of/scared of in the last few years. Plus "stress raises cortisol levels, which can dis-regulate blood sugar." GREAT COOL LOVE IT!!!) Sigh. Having a body is hard sometimes.

How do you get out from under feeling like shit about this stuff? I suppose that contrary to my instincts, I should talk about it (and I guess I'm starting that by writing). It just feels hard and scary because even people who are trying to be helpful can end up saying things that feel shitty. But I know that I've been helped by other people sharing vulnerably around this kind of stuff, helping me to question entrenched assumptions about bodies and health and move toward attitudes that are hopefully freer for all of us. So perhaps, bit by bit, I will find it in me.