Abandoned by our OBGYN with only a week to go

Via Facebook chat and Skype, I managed to connect with a couple of my old friends today, women that I know will always have the right words for times like these, and I feel a lot better. Why did I need comfort and assurance? If you know me at all, you’ll know that I am not a person to get stressed or worked up about things. The “things will always work out in the end” attitude my father instilled in me from an early age has never left me, and I take things the way they come, with faith and confidence in hand. For some reason, I’m thinking hormonal, I’ve had a slightly different mind-set these past couple of days, though, when suddenly, as the birth of our third son is approaching fast, another challenge was added to our situation. The doctor that we have gradually come to trust over these past months, who was to deliver our baby, has suddenly been faced with an emergency family situation, and has to travel to the US next week, two days before our delivery. He will not be back for a while. He gave us two options: we can either go in on Sunday, which would be fine as far as the baby is concerned, or we can stick with our date, which is all the more safer as far as the baby is concerned, but have his colleague, a woman whom we have never met or even heard of, deliver our baby. For a brief moment last night, thinking about these options, I let fear get the best of me, and started thinking about the words I will want to say to the boys and Courtney before I go into the OR, just in case they are my last. I felt scared: scared of the needle in my spine, scared of the scalpel, scared of possible bleeding, scared of anything and everything that can go wrong during a surgery. (For a non-medical doctor person, I've read more about these things than is healthy, and so the possibilities were nearly endless.) I thought about death. It was like being 16 again, only this adolescent moment was neither accompanied by loud music by The Cure, nor was it interrupted by my mother calling me to dinner. I fell asleep disheartened.

Sunday is the worst day possible for us to go in. Not only is it the first day of classes at AUC, but my mother is also arriving in the evening, and she will need to be greeted, briefed, shown around, settled in and most importantly, brought to the Duty Free Shop. (That last one is a joke – other worries are definitely overshadowing our decreasing liquor supply for the moment. -- Come to think of it, it may be more of a partial joke actually.) It would be something else if we still lived in Belgium, but considering the fact that things are so different here, I’m not expecting my mom, as competent as she is (she has travelled the world) to just show up and figure everything out on her own, all the while caring for our two, no doubt worried, boys. Where she comes from, gas stoves have not been heard of for decades, and a gas stove is all we’ve got. As you may know if you’ve lived here for a while, there’s a certain manner to doing your grocery shopping, to get around, and to go about, and I would want to be here for at least half a day with my mom before leaving her to it all. If we were to go in on Sunday, that wouldn’t work out.

What does it matter who does the cutting? Why not just go with the other doctor? Since we’ve already had thoughts about delivering in Egypt – a different culture from what we are used to – it has been important to us to find a doctor that we can relate to and trust. This confidence has taken a few months to build. Just accepting someone else does not come naturally. Having said that, this is exactly what we are hoping for: we’ve managed to get an appointment with this colleague doctor tonight, to find out if perhaps it’s no big deal. I am hoping that we’ll meet her and think that we can trust her and that things will work out. I’m hopeful.

Yes, this was me freaking out. Thanks for listening.