Thumpedy-thumpedy-thumpedy…
Saw the midwife this morning. Nothing much to report except that she did find a heartbeat that most certainly isn’t mine, so that’s a good thing. My blood pressure reading wasn’t terrible either (115/87, although I’m not sure I buy the top number) considering that my insides were feeling like I was about to go take a school exam, and I found myself staring long and hard at the adorable Anne Geddes picture up on the wall in an attempt to calm down.
After the appointment I went for my 1 km swim, and then walked home in the rain with an umbrella! (Almost killed it a few times due to wind, but made it home with an intact umbrella.)
Look, it’s wet outside! It’s dry inside though, and here are the ex-seeds that we planted way too late this summer and got moved indoors a week ago or so. The big plant (with the flowers) was given to us by my grandma this summer. 🙂
The blood pressure thing is of course entirely irrational, but it all got started when I was carrying Anna and the hospital made a decision that I was very unhappy with, and caused a lot of stress.
What happened was that the hospital used to have a team of midwives which oversaw uncomplicated pregnancies and delivered the babies. Since midwives can’t charge as much for their services as the OBs (the proper doctors) the hospital wasn’t making money off of them, and so decided to terminate the midwifery program. In a fit of generosity, all the midwives were given three months notice before they’d have to leave the hospital, during which they’d only be on call between 8am – 5pm on weekdays. Their departure date was 1 January, and I was to deliver Anna on 3 January.
To me this felt like the hospital putting financial interests above my well being as a patient, and the hospital became a stressful place. My blood pressure started shooting up, which made everybody nervous, which made me more stressed which didn’t help with the blood pressure etc. etc. And since then, I’ve associated blood pressure readings with ‘something bad’.
Interestingly, I went to a heart doctor a year ago, and she had me do a 24 hour blood pressure test, meaning I had a cuff on for 24 hours attached to a gadget which made a measurement once an hour. As it turned out, my numbers were lower than usual and I think it was because I couldn’t see the measurement results once the measurement had been made. My brain is weird.