Evagation

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

After having a minor breakdown yesterday.

Devin and I went to see my gastroenterologist yesterday for my colonoscopy follow-up appointment. All of the news was good. Which is why my meltdown came as such a surprise to Devin. First of all. We had to wait two hours for me to be taken. I HATE sitting in doctors offices and waiting because it sometimes feels like my entire life has been sitting in doctors offices, waiting to be admitted into an exam room. So, I was already stressed and cranky by the time the doctor even showed up. Devin marveled at how far he'd gotten on some video game on his Nintendo DS Lite (I still have the old DS which makes me MAD because I want a DS Lite Noble Pink like you cannot believe) and tried to calm me down. Doctor finally shows up. "Great news. Clean colonoscopy. Even got into most of the small intestine. No signs of active Crohn's disease. Dr. Davis tells me this is a first for you." Dr. Davis was my pediatric GI and yup, having no signs of active Crohn's IS a first for me. Devin and I had already pretty much known this because Dr. Dhillon had told my Dad all of this after the colonoscopy itself (they never tell the patient any of this because the Versed that they give us as part of the sedation process would make us all forget anything, anyway). Dr. Dhillon explains how I can now scale back on some of my meds (which, um, didn't want to tell him that I'd started to do that already because he might not be like Dr. Davis, who never minded me messing around with my own meds schedule) but can't stop taking them entirely because remission is so new for me that we don't want to make any hasty mistakes. Then he's about to leave when Devin pipes up, "Well, you know, why I'M HERE..." "Oh, yes. Baby. Children. Start family." Dr. Dhillon has an extremely strong accent, and, according to Wikipedia, the type of turban that he wears means that he's probably Sikh. Possibly from India. I honestly have no clue on this one but I felt that I needed to share that half the time I have no clue what the man is saying and I have to make him repeat himself. I suck at trying to decipher strong accents. "You can start trying to get pregnant right now." Um... what? What about my meds and stuff? I'm on leukemia drugs, don't I need to be OFF those before trying to get pregnant? "You are on low dose of medication. Everything I've read says that such a low dose is not a problem for the fetus." I believe Dr. Dhillon when he says stuff like this because he also has degrees in pharmacology and he knows what he's talking about when it comes to medication. "I subscribe to many journals and have many resources to research this for you. Let me remind my staff to remind me to look up these drugs (6-MP, the leukemia drug, and Asacol, a 5-ASA drug) and make sure they are okay to take while pregnant. Normally it's the sulfur based drugs, and the steroids, that they don't want pregnant women to take." I nod because Dr. Dhillon doesn't seem to realize that I'm not going to take steroids again, even if I'm not pregnant, unless I'm dying. "Call me back on Friday and I will let you know what I find out. I'm pretty sure you'll be fine to continue taking these two drugs but we'll make sure. Then you can start trying for baby." This must have been when I went into shock. Doc left and instructed me to just make another follow-up appointment for a few months from now, and reminded me to call him on Friday about pregnancy and my meds. If I said anything, I don't remember it, and somehow we got to the car and started heading home. We live about forty-five miles from most of my doctors because the small town that we live in has CRAP GI specialists (one guy likes to prescribe prayer for his patients instead of meds, and I'm not kidding, the other guy traumatized me when I was a kid and I'm never seeing him again in my entire life). We hadn't even gotten to the freeway (which is only about five minutes away from Dr. Dhillon's office) before Devin starts jumping into talking about having a baby. "What time of year do you want to have the baby? I don't want a summer baby, and we already have a lot of birthdays in the winter." He said a whole lot more than this but I was still in shock. The shock that had rendered me speechless. Devin's still going on about what time of year he wants to have a baby, so subtract nine months and that's when we'll start trying. I'm just dumbfounded. Is he being serious? Oh yeah. VERY serious. Now he's mad at me because I'm not willing to commit to a time of year that I want to birth the baby. All I can get out is that "I can't talk about this right now." Which only made him madder. How can I not want to talk about this? This was the whole reason we got me healthy, I had PROMISED him that this was what I wanted, so why wouldn't I talk about this with him!? "I just... can't decide when to birth the baby right now. This seems very important to you. That's fine. I can't think about that right now. You go right ahead, though, and pick out the time of year you want to have a child." I thought that was very adult of me, reasonable and respecting of his desire to plot the conception of our child. He just got madder. "Why won't you talk about this with me!!?" "I CAN'T TALK ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW." Then I started crying. "Are you CRYING?" God. He made it sound like I was losing my mind and was being a horrible wife. "I can't... I just can't... this is too much pressure. I don't want to sit here deciding with you when to give birth because that's out of my control. I have no idea WHEN I'm going off my birth control, and once I do, there's no guarantee that I'll get pregnant right away. It could take MONTHS. It could take YEARS. PLEASE STOP PRESSURING ME ABOUT THIS." "FINE. If you don't want to talk about this then that's just FINE." He sounded like me when I scream "FINE" at him at the end of an argument. Which meant that he was obviously not FINE with all of this but I was beyond talking at that point. We drove home in complete silence. Once we got home I just lost it. I sat down on our bed and started bawling. Those big, loud, body-shaking sobs that make you sound like you're choking on your own emotions. At first Devin didn't seem to care--there goes Katie, crying again. Except I didn't stop crying. I just cried, and cried, and cried. Finally he comes over, puts his arm around me and says, "What's wrong?" in a very gentle voice. Which was good because if he had used his mean, scary voice like in the car, I might have slapped him. "This is all good news, Katie. You're so healthy. This is GREAT NEWS. What's WRONG?" "I haven't even decided when to go off birth control and you're already planning the birth. Narrowed down to a specific time of year that you want to have a child. WHAT IF IT DOESN'T GO ACCORDING TO YOUR SCHEDULE? AND WHY DO YOU GET TO MAKE THE SCHEDULE?" I was screaming at him through my sobs. "I'm already worried enough about carrying a healthy baby to term. I just want to be able to make us a healthy baby. Now you want me to focus on WHEN to make that healthy baby. I just CAN'T DO THAT RIGHT NOW." I think he finally began to hear me. Because then he started apologizing for putting all that pressure on me before we'd even discussed me going off the birth control. Saying that we don't have to make any decision right now, that he didn't realize how freaked out I was going to get about all of this and that he's just SO EXCITED, and I am SO FREAKED OUT. "I just... never thought this would happen. My docs told me my entire life that it would be so hard for me to get pregnant, that I might not even be able to try to get pregnant, that my disease is so severe that it would leech away nutrition from my fetus and make it horribly deformed." "Well, your docs also thought you would be dead by eighteen if you didn't let them remove your colon when you were nine. They were wrong about that, and now they were wrong about this." Which was probably another reason I was freaking out. At twelve years old, when I was really, really sick and told that I might not ever be able to carry a healthy child to term, I decided that was fine and I would just adopt. No big deal. That was fourteen years ago. It's been a very recent idea that hey, maybe I COULD carry a healthy baby to term. Then learning that all systems are good to go on this, and all of my docs have signed off on me being healthy enough to start trying to get pregnant. And the first thing my husband wants to do is make a freakin' baby schedule. While I'm still wrapping my brain around the notion that all of my doctors have told me I'm healthy enough to start trying to get pregnant. Which lead to me thinking, am I ready to start trying to have a child? Will I ever be ready? (My father-in-law just asked me why I freaked yesterday after my doctor's appointment. I am going to kill my husband.) Well. I HAD thought that I had gotten over being mad at my husband. But, apparently, he regaled the entire pool company with tales about crazy Katie and her breakdown yesterday. My brothers-in-law just teased me about my freak out. All of them just started laughing at me. So, I'm now ready to start crying all over again. It's just... I don't know. I spent the morning trying to get an appointment with an OB/GYN to get papped and everything, trying to be the good non-freaking out wife and going ahead with this plan to have a kid. And Devin spent his morning making fun of me to the point where everyone I work with is now laughing at me. Is this funny? Have I just lost all perspective on reality? How in the world did Devin think my freak-out yesterday was FUNNY? And why was he so nice to me about it last night just to turn around and make fun of me for it today? Now I'm seriously distraught. It's one thing when it was just me and Devin, working through these problems together, but now I've got all of my in-laws (and other company employees) laughing at me and telling me that I need to relax. How in the WORLD is that relaxing? I guess this means that I'm freaking-out again. I wonder how funny Devin's going to find it this time.

Posted by Katie. on Wednesday, March 07, 2007 at 8:48 AM | Permalink | 5 comments | links to this post   

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