This was the same OB who needed to be paternal about using Cytotec. This is the only other quote from him that I submitted, and to be honest I can come up with several times more things that could be submitted for Thoughtful Thursdays. This was the same day as the Cytotec comment, and I’m not sure if he was having a bad day with a severe case of foot in mouth or if at 41 and a half weeks pregnant he could let his true colors shine through. If it’s the latter, it does worry me if we end up having another baby before my husband gets new orders since I don’t want to deal with a late 3rd trimester bait and switch.
While I was pregnant I had either pre-existing or pregnancy induced hypertension. I’d had a few high readings within a year of getting pregnant but I don’t get sick often and I always could come with a reason for the numbers being elevated. It was consistently high for my first several prenatal appointments (140s over 90s), and my OB prescribed medication that kept it in the normal range, and when I was taken off the medication at the hospital after my daughter was born, my BP was a little higher than it was untreated but still normal and has been since. I never had any other signs of pre-eclampsia. I mention this because we had discussed the possibility of inducing around 39 weeks per ACOG’s recommendations.
I wasn’t completely comfortable with inducing, especially before my due date, but I would have consented if my OB had felt that my blood pressure warranted a danger to the baby. When I was writing my birth plan, I included a provision that if an induction became necessary I would prefer that if things didn’t seem to be working to be allowed to go home and try again later. My blood pressure looked fine, as did the Biophysical Profile and the NST, at 39 weeks so he said he didn’t see any reason to induce. At 40 weeks 2 days we discussed induction since I was past my due date, but (with no issue whatsoever at all) I decided to wait another week and see what happened. A week later, I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of options, and I had resigned myself that I was going to end up being induced. I was very much defeated, and he knew it. We had already had the discussion in his office about exactly how the induction would take place and scheduled it for the next night with the hospital. He was walking my husband and I to the check-out desk, and he stopped in his nurse’s office to get the paperwork that I needed to take with me to the hospital with me. He gave me the paperwork, and told me this. I looked at him for a second, and mumbled something about knowing I wasn’t going to be able to go home and that I’d written that when we’d been discussing a 39 week induction, and left to go home.
I’ve already mentioned here and on the other post that for the most part I liked my doctor, and as I put it at an ICAN meeting he was a good doctor, but very much an OB and not a midwife in a white coat. I think that what bothers me most isn’t so much the misogyny (though I didn’t like that) and the dismissal of a differently specialty, but the fact that he knew I was defeated and had given up on going into labor on my own and was preoccupied with the knowledge that (as we thought at the time) my husband would be leaving for Afghanistan in less than two weeks. I think that in some ways I felt like I was taken advantage of when I was vulnerable.