My Plan

Sometime after midnight on January 1, 2010, a group of friends stood gathered in a hotel room in downtown Des Moines. These were the first few hours of New Years Day, the bars had closed, and we decided that it was time to talk about our resolutions. As we worked our way around the room, a few were serious, most were meant to make people laugh, but mine was just kind of generic and boring: "I'd like to be more patient this year and try to be a better person." But to myself I was thinking, 'Maybe we'll try to start a family this year.'

After all, I was halfway into my third year of med school, past the point where we could get pregnant and have a baby during the legendary fourth year, the time when med students were supposed to get it a little easier, schedule some vacation time and maybe even some maternity leave. The fourth year baby was not a foreign concept to people at my school by any means. Many of my fellow engaged and married female classmates had set the alarms on their biological clocks the minute we sat down for our first lecture as first-years. Personally, I had wrestled with the idea. Could I really handle the stress of both medical school and motherhood? Joe also struggled with it. "What if you're busier than you think you're going to be?" Never once did we ask ourselves, "What if we can't have a baby during fourth year, even if we tried?"

Anyways, back to 2010... Even though I was thinking about a family during the New Years resolution discussion, Joe and I had come to an agreement months ago. We decided that a new baby during fourth year would be nice, but an infant during the transition to residency would be too much, and we would just defer the family thing for a while.

Soon after New Years, second semester began and I started out on psychiatry. During this rotation, word began to spread that some of my classmates were indeed pregnant. I was so happy for them, honestly. I knew how badly they wanted this. I should have seen it coming, but the news was also making me want it, and I was starting to reconsider "the agreement." Then, on one unusually slow day on the psych consult service, I was sitting in the work room with two classmates, both parents of young children. We were on the newly popular topic of babies when one of them told me excitedly, "You should have a baby!" and went on to list the reasons why. Later that afternoon, another classmate was driving me to our lecture when she suddenly turned down the radio, looked at me, and said (guess what?), "You should have a baby!"

I waited a few days before I cornered Joe in the living room in front of a muted TV. I probably didn't say "We need to talk" exactly, but it was something along those lines. It was a long discussion, and I told Joe that I wouldn't go into too much personal detail, so let's just say that we revised "the agreement" so that it looked a little something like this: We're going to give it a shot. For the next six months, we won't necessarily try to have a baby, but we won't really try not to either. (Side note: When you're "not not trying" to have a baby, you're trying to have a baby.) If, after six months, we have not conceived a child, then we will have to go back to the old agreement and then talk again at the end of fourth year.

So, Joe and I were both present for the same discussion and we both agreed to the same terms, but the flood gates had opened, and I was on a mission to get pregnant. The fact that I started my OB/GYN rotation with Labor and Delivery exactly one week after the talk probably had something to do with this... L&D is still in the running for the best two weeks of my entire med school career. I got to leave campus for this rotation and work at another hospital in the community, which I loved. Oh, and then I got to witness and participate in the miracle of a new human life coming into the world about thirty times. If you know what verklempt means (SNL, "Coffee Talk"), I teetered between this and elation for two weeks straight, and I actually cried right there in the delivery room on multiple occasions. I thought (and still think) that the whole process was the most amazing thing, and I felt (and still feel) lucky to be a woman. I think I even went home one day after a thirty hour shift, sleep-deprived and delirious with excitement, and I said to my husband, "Doesn't it suck that you are a man?"

Needless to say, getting pregnant was all I could think about, and I decided that it was time to approach this in the same way that I approach all important things in my life, with a meticulously thought-out plan. So here is what I came up with. I convinced myself that I would probably get pregnant within 2-4 weeks of "the talk" and the revised agreement. This put my due date in mid- to late November. I just happened to be working on my fourth year schedule at the time, so I busily worked out a plan that had me taking vacation in November and December, not to mention the two weeks of Winter Break to follow which would put me at 10 weeks of maternity leave. It was perfect.

Here's the problem. My focus was fitting this baby into my schedule. It was a baby, the miracle of life, and my main objective was to pencil it in somewhere.

Here's the other problem. I actually convinced myself that this was all up to me. Joe and I had never "not not tried" to get pregnant before, but I already had it all figured out? I made myself feel like I had everything under control when I was actually more lost than I had ever been. I was way off, and I had no idea. I think that, if God chuckles, He was definitely chuckling at me during this time. But I think He was also worried about me and how unprepared I was for what was to come. He eventually sent me some signs that all was not well, which I will get to, but I was so blind and foolish in the beginning, entirely focused on this plan, my perfect plan.

(What I'm listening to right now...)
A Fine Frenzy One Cell In the Sea