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When I was 33 weeks pregnant with my second child, I went to my doctor for a routine prenatal checkup. As it turned out, there was nothing routine about it. The Doppler wand slid around my stomach in search of a heartbeat, but there was none to be found. I learned that my baby had died in utero and would be stillborn. In hindsight, I think I knew there was something terribly wrong, but I couldn't admit to the fear.
Not surprisingly, for a mother who has lost a baby, prenatal checkups in subsequent pregnancies become a lifeline. Still, the new layer of apprehension is always there. The weigh-in and the peeing in a cup are the very least of it. Prenatal checkups scaffold the intense fear and anxiety that often follow such a huge loss.
I was truly surprised, however, to discover that while a large part of me dreaded prenatal visits, an even larger piece of me emerged that began to fully love them. Seeing my OB during my pregnancies after that painful loss was like a muscle-memory training camp in learning to trust my body again.
I'm aware that many women who have had a traumatic birth will avoid returning to the OB or midwife who oversaw her care during that pregnancy. It's not so much that the doctor is blamed, but more that the act of returning to thesameoffice allows the post-traumatic playlist to blare full blast. I understand the impulse to start all over again, but I'm glad I didn't switch. My doctor became my staunchest ally.
When I got pregnant after my son was stillborn, I attended monthly prenatal exams. I was offered a sonogram at each of these because of my history. There was something necessary and cathartic about staring at that monitor. It allowed me to let that baby into my heart. The first months of that new pregnancy felt perilous. I took what reassurance I could. Even though I knew more than most that everything can change in the blink of an eye, seeing a tiny pulsing heartbeat was reassuring.
Once a pregnancy is "viable" (or even slightly before), many doctors of high-risk patients will ramp up additional monitoring. With this first pregnancy after my son was stillborn, starting at around 24 weeks, I visited the hospital weekly for a nonstress test. Nonstress testing involves putting a Velcro belt around your tummy and watching tracings spew forth from a machine that can somehow predict any impending trouble. Don't ask me how it works; I couldn't say. I intentionally did not ask too many questions.
But as the pregnancy progressed, I made sure to carefully monitor fetal movement. And I was always relieved to have my cautious optimism validated by my OB. Prenatal checkups provided hard data to show that risking the love I could not help but give away, as they say, might well result in exquisite joy, rather than exquisite agony.
All of the steps in prenatal exams were reassuring in a new way—even giving urine samples while balanced on the edge of the toilet or stepping on a scale to see how much weight I'd gained this time. And it meant everything to hear a medical professional say that all was looking as it should.
I entered each prenatal exam full of trepidation. I left reassured that things were, at that moment, all right. This was a weirdly powerful thing, because the capacity to hit pause on panic meant that my anxious brain could not get out too far in front of me.
The objectivity and stone-cold science of a prenatal exam, combined with a doctor who wanted to help me, were the greatest tools to my surviving not one but two post-loss pregnancies.
Opinions expressed by parent contributors are their own.