Look, I try not to point fingers on this blog, but it’s the truth.  Patricia Briggs is totally ruining my birth plan.

Here’s the deal:

My technical due date isn’t until March 26th…..but, as you all know, I’m pregnant with twins.  Doctors around these parts get real hand-flappy if you go past 38 weeks pregnant with twins. (FYI:  Forty weeks is the standard gestation for a baby, and I went to 42 weeks with both boys.  What can I say?  I like to bake ’em a little longer.)

At first I was pretty disgruntled by this fact. Look, I know they’re just doing their best to avoid terrible situations and outcome.  The placenta is an organ, and by the time you hit the end of your pregnancy, it’s at the end of its lifespan.  It’s like a little 80-year-old woman toddling around, with the difference being that instead of getting to take it easy and do crossword puzzles and watch daytime television, it is being forced to work double overtime with no days off, since the fetus is bigger than ever and requiring more nutrients than ever.  Placentas get old – they give out.  They fail.  They quit nourishing.

I get all that.

But I still get annoyed at what I consider unnecessary medical intervention.  The average fraternal twin birth over in the UK is a little over 39 weeks, and their maternal stats are a lot better than ours over here in the US.

Sigh.  I’m getting preachy again, aren’t I?  Let me get back to the point:  I’ve agreed to the no-later-than-38-week induction for one reason and one reason only:  if I go into labor on my own, there’s a chance that I might go into labor late on a Saturday night, or on a super busy Friday morning, or some other really inconvenient time.  The reason it might be inconvenient has to do with the availability of the high-risk perinatologists over at OHSU.

It boils down to this:  pretty much all the high-risk perinatologists are trained and comfortable with breech births, whereas very few of the regular Ob/GYN docs are comfortable with breech births. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s really common for the second baby to come out breech, even if it’s pointing head down at first.  Once the first baby is out, the second baby tends to sprawl out with all the extra space, and you can get some weird birth presentations.

 

Don’t get me wrong – the regular Ob/GYNs at OHSU  know how to do a breech birth, but they are just much less comfortable with it and much more prone to C-sections if things get “weird” in the delivery room.  Of course, “delivery room” is a subjective term.  When you give birth to twins you actually get to give birth on a surgical table inside an actual surgical room.

Hooray.

The upside to that is if something goes wrong, it’s easy to fix things.  Scary bleeding? Stuck child?  Weirdness you’re not comfortable with?  Bam – you can do an instant C-section, with no extra prep time necessary.

The downside to that is that I have to, you know, give birth on a teeny-weenie, narrow and sterile surgical table with about 400 doctors and nurses staring at my crotch.  I wonder if I should charge admission to any extra bystanders?  “See Becky Bean’s magically fertile crotch spew forth two humans at once! Only $5 a ticket!   Popcorn available around the corner.”

It’s not exactly the feel-good, hippy waterbirth I was imagining when I first got pregnant, but at least I’d make some extra money on the side?

Wait, where was I?  Oh, yeah.  So anyways, if I give birth at an “inconvenient” time, my chances of having a C-section go way, way up, and that’s something I want to avoid as much as possible.

Look, this isn’t a “NATURAL BIRTH IS THE ONLY BIRTH” blog – I’m grateful for the C-section I had with DragonMonkey, because without it we would have had some serious issues.  However, there’s no denying that it’s a major surgery.  I was up and running (or, at the very least, walking comfortably and running errands) 48 hours after giving birth to the Squidgelet.  It took me weeks to get to that point after my C-section.  I would much rather deal round-the-clock nursing of twins and caring for a newborn without having to heal from major surgery, thank you very much.

Besides, I like my perinatologist.  She’s smart, capable, and has slender, tiny arms with slender, tiny hands.  I learned from past experience that when it comes to hands on a doctor, errr, size matters.  It really does. I’d really love to have it be her tiny, delicate little arms rooting around inside me in the event of a breech birth.

So, I’ve agreed to being induced (unless I go into labor on my own, earlier) on March 9th.

There’s just one problem with that:

Patricia Briggs’ new Mercy Thompson book comes out on March 8th.  Have you guys read the Mercy Thompson series?  If you’re at all into urban fantasy, I highly recommend it.  The heroine is kick-butt and intelligent, but not annoyingly so.  It’s one of my favorite series of all times, right alongside Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files.

Anyways, you can see where my problem is.  I’ve been waiting for the book for a year, and it comes out on the 8th.  My perinatologist wants to induce me on the 9th.

This doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for me to stay up until 4am binge-reading, you know?

 

At my next appointment I am going to have to tell my doctor that we need to reschedule the date to the 10th.  I have about three weeks to come up with a decent reason why I’m requesting this change.  I’m sure she’s going to ask me, even if only to make conversation, and “Hey, I know I said the 9th works and you’ve already penciled me in, but I’m planning on staying up all night binge reading a new book on the 8th, so let’s just reschedule everything”  is the truth, but it’s kind of embarrassing to say out loud.

I’ve been trying to come up with reasonable lies.  So far I’ve come up with:

 

• The Feng Shui of the date is off.
• I’m allergic to single-digit birthdates.
• My other two kids were born on Thursdays, so I wanna keep the pattern going.
• March 9th is also written as 3-9, and 9 is the square of three, and I don’t want my kids to be squares.
• I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

I mean, theoretically I guess I could be an adult and read the book at a nice, sedate pace and put it down at a decent hour to get a good night’s sleep…. but we all know that’s not gonna happen.