week 13

To be honest, the angle of the sun exaggerates my large-ness -- it's really not that noticeable! But a bad picture is better than no picture, right??

board exams

So I got my Step 2 Board scores today: I passed - hurray! The funny part: my scores were all right around average except for one disease topic: "Disorders of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Puerperium" and one medical specialty: "OB/GYN". In those two, I was way above average (I got a little *star* for being off-the-chart). I guess when I was studying, I paid special attention to the stuff that hit home!

second trimester ambitions

Well this is written in ambitious anticipation. As this is my 12th week, I am now nearing the close of my first trimester. So I have decided that all of my first trimester symptoms are going to end (silence! no dissent!). As such, I am soon going to start having plenty of energy - no more couch-sitting-wall-starring for me - and eating normal food again (vegetables!). But before that happens, here's a list of all those crazy things that I have eaten in the past three months, particularly the things which you might otherwise have thought I would never eat again:

• mac&cheese
• frozen pizza - any pizza really - as long as it's sans veggies
• bagels, bagels, more bagels with cream cheese
• icing (yes, off a cake - eeeww!)
• white rice with butter
• Fettuccine Alfredo
  
• Olive Garden
• hamburgers at least weekly
• lots of fruit juice
• ramen noodles
  
• taco bell (7 layer burrito - which was as disgusting as I should have known it would be!)
• 40 oz steak(s)
• organic cheesecake (may have to continue to eating this)

Do you see the theme? teehee - so much for my pre-baby ambitions for infusing him/her with health and vitamins from the day of conception. Well if my preferences don't change, I think I'll have to change the menu anyway to save the marriage. Although Joe has been surprisingly tolerant of our new eating style, lately it has become evident that he is getting tired of it. Last week he made veggie stir-fry and threatened me that he'd name the baby Kale if I didn't eat it!

everyone deserves a little insanity

So I will fess up with a little story that might amuse you all ...
When you start medical school, they warn you about "med student-itis" - the process by which you diagnose yourself repeatedly with diseases you do not have because you are learning about them, and you attribute your self-reflections to symptoms. This is quite common (i.e. "this morning I woke up tired - I must have mono"). For several years I suffered from the delusion that I was immune to this self-involved, head-in-the-clouds condition, thinking "I am much too grounded to be so silly".

Enter pregnancy. In my defense, I think it would be hard for anyone to find out about a new life growing in the belly and then spend two weeks cramming the head with all the things that can go wrong with pregnancy, intra-partum, post-partum, and all those horrible disease that are first diagnosed in childhood. It really was a bummer of a time to study for board exams.

I did pretty well with all of the pre-term labor, fetal anomalies, complications of childbirth, post-partum hemorrhage, and meningococcemia. But one disease really got to me: pseudocyesis. This is a condition where people think they are pregnant, but are not. The freaky part is that, not only do they think they are pregnant, but they have all the signs and symptoms - missed periods, morning sickness, breast tenderness, fatigue, abdominal swelling, weight gain, and - get ready for this - even a positive pregnancy test!! This really happens!! Now of course I knew this condition was quite rare (i.e. my mom the shrink has seen it only twice - once in a male - and my OB has never even heard of it) but nevertheless, there were a few terrifying days when I was completely convinced that I had pseudocyesis. I thought: what could be worse than having to call all your friends and family and say "I was actually never pregnant, but I am getting admitted to the psychiatric ward for insanity!"

Of course, my rational brain knew the baby was real; Joey said there was no way I would have stopped eating veggies for a false-alarm child; my Mom said "I'm not going to try to talk you out of a silly obsession" and my Dad's brilliant advice, a shrug: "Oh". No one would sympathize. But I got a small dose of what it feels like to be consumed to the point of paralysis with an utterly ridiculous worry about a almost-non-existent disease. Maybe this'll give me a little more empathy for Joe's delusion that he's going bald, or for that strange guy in the ER about the bomb in his printer. After all, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. :)

it's a real baby!!!

In case anyone was worried that I was insane and not pregnant, we now have real proof! This is my 10-week old bambino - if you look closely, you can see an upside-down very large head, a stomach, two arms and two legs floating in the blob in the middle of the gray. (The astute might also notice a glint of amniotic sac at the top, next to the right foot.) My sister was thoroughly unimpressed, but trust me, it was much cuter when you could see the little arms and legs flailing madly, and the tiny heartbeat fluttering away :) - how exciting! Technology is amazing: To think people used to have to wait until the baby was born to know it had all the right parts! Joey's reflection: "it's so cute; now I am sad we have to wait such a long time to meet it" - well, baby, we aren't quite ready for ya - so stay in there for a few more months!

PS: for the techno-challenged, if you click the picture, it gets bigger!

a high altitute start on life

Everyone is edging for a photo update - this is on Mt. Rainier - I couldn't quite work up the courage to ask someone to take a picture with my shirt up! But you can see that I really haven't changed - the same little pooch I had 3 weeks ago!!

"who are you and what have you done with my wife?"

I think this is Joey's favorite phrase lately - at least once a day he gives me the look of "I can't believe I heard you say that" - usually related to food. For the first time ever, I am having a really hard time doing anything healthy. Believe it or not, I don't like vegetables anymore, which pretty much means, I don't like anything that we used to eat. No salads, no sandwiches, no soups. No carrots or sweet peas for snacks.

I knew something was amiss when I was in the Boston airport - reading the menu for Au Bon Pain and thinking - usually, I would have a hard time deciding between all of these delicious items, but now I am having a hard time convincing myself that I could choke down any of them - so I went a few steps down the hall and got a cheeze pizza from Sparro!! Impossible - I thought my life was ending. Joe said "you hate pizza". Followed over the next few days with "but, you don't like mac&cheese" and "are you sure? we've never bought frozen lazagna - you aren't going to like it". Now he's getting used to my new preferences (although he insists there is no pattern - other than veggie-avoidance), and he accompanies me late at night to Burgerville for a hamburger or to the grocery to buy ramen-like noodle packages, with only a little astonishment, and I hear things like "of course you want that - it's full of salt and fat - everything we like!" Fortunately, they do make organic frozen pizza and all-natural beef is pretty easy to find in Portland. Maybe I am trading one sort of health for another: detoxified, but full of clean junk!