Worry Begins

What you hate about being pregnant is the Antenatal Care which requires regular check up. Even after you have undergone the test 5 times, you cringe as you see the needle to draw out your blood. Today was one such day. I said, I’m at my most capable state to go for the check up on my own. Two or three of my concerned friends called to say that if there was any help I needed, I must tell them. But what help would I need? Why waste someone else’s time by letting her sit next to you? All you have to do is wait after you have given your prescription inside the nurse’s chamber. And unless you are so tired that you are collapsing, there is no need for a friend. But that is not to say that having your husband beside you adds no emotional support. It makes you feel warm and cared.

Lucky side of me: I had asked leave from office today. I have had tiredness. There was one time when I felt so tired even though I sat the whole day and there was no heavy work. I felt crampy pain beneath my knees and a colleague who became father recently told me that women do get cramps on their legs during pregnancy. But it disappeared by the time office time got over and I went home.

For some reason, I feel I will give birth without any difficulty. I get a feeling that all should go well. I feel that I can deliver at home – though, I know my husband won’t hear me say that. I can see him taking me to the hospital even before water has broken, the day my due date arrives or before. But I do plan to take medical leave by 8 and half months. I think I deserve it.

Now, my only fear at this moment is that, I must not be consumed in the conventional thought of care for one’s baby. I have hated enough to hear people work so hard, sometime getting blind in their struggle and then put their care and worry about children’s future to be the reason.  Even before my baby is born, I’m deciding that, all I can give him/her is education and he/she will have no fat bank balance, acres of land or huge buildings to inherit.

I say worry has now begun because, today, the nurse placed her hand hard on several places on my belly, took a measuring tape and then told me, ‘your baby is little small.’ She meant it is smaller than normal. And in the 25 minutes I took to walk home after the test, this sentence accompanied my thought and I wondered what tiny little baby I’m going to give birth to. I hope it will be healthy. She did say too that it is normal and I must do ultrasound next month – 3^rd December, 2010. Time runs fast, yet, I feel impatience building inside me. Worry has begun as well in that, I can sense myself beginning to become more possessive – in the sense that, I feel I must have my baby in my arms without any problem at all and he/she must not undergo any difficulty. I feel her/him and I find myself engulfed in the emotion that I cannot explain. I feel like crying. It is like, suddenly you have your heart in your mouth and you go dumb except for the feeling that you can do anything in the world to just wipe out any difficulty there is for the baby.

The first thing the nurse did was take my weight. I had weighed 54kg two months back. I climbed on the weighing machine and she read, 54. As she was about it note it down in my prescription, she was surprised. She exclaimed, “What? Your weight hasn’t gone up?” She asked me to get on the machine again and this time she noted it to be 55, but I doubted her. In the entire duration of 7 months pregnancy, I put on only 1kg of weight and this has worried me. One time this even made me question if my baby wasn’t growing. Else, the machine has to be faulty.

Next, she took my BP. “Your BP is low”, she said. I’m aware of that. People complain that I take so much salt in the curry. But despite this fact, my BP has always remained low. Giddiness has always been my problem. But despite the low BP these past few months of pregnancy, I have had no incidence of severe giddiness where I would feel faint and unstable. A month back my husband took my BP and he said, “Your good, countable pulse is only 50.” That didn’t say much to me. I’m a person who has never really taken time to note the range for normal BP and any other similar health knowledge.

Anyway, as you carry another soul inside you, worry piles up one on another. And the day you know you are pregnant, you know you have more to do than just live for yourself. You know that you now need to look for a future where you will have another person seeking your hand for guidance. And you alone stand responsible for how this person will grow up.