The Last One Out

Today our friend who was due three weeks after us gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Imagine our surprise and confusion at the news: we were all in a line and now that line is bent (almost as out of shape as I am!).

I called my friend who is in the U.S. and due four days after us. We moaned about these boys we are carrying that have no intention of coming out early. The two of us are the only ones in the summer line up who have come almost to full term. The thought of being 'late' was terrifying to me. Now I go between gratitude at all the things I've been able to get done and curiosity about when the guy will make his appearance.

This has thrown me for a loop because most of the children in my family are born early; almost all my nieces, and even most of us siblings.

I wasn't getting impatient until my husband kindly informed me he didn't want us to go to see the sea turtles hatch their eggs because it was an hour outside of the city.

Rightly or wrongly this imposition only made me furious: as if sitting around, getting bigger, hanging out with my mom wasn't slow enough. Now I was being banned into my house because of this kid who was so comfortable, his head wasn't even in the right direction to exit?

My mom shared a story about being left alone at home with a ten year old girl while the rest of her family went to see a boat at eight months pregnant. Unexpectedly I had an ally.

I tried to reason with everyone: Labor rarely lasts only an hour. After all even the baby girl delivered today at 4:15 p.m. started her way out the previous night at 2:30 in the morning.

The likelihood of my delivery taking only one hour was slim to none.

"Do you want to be in pain for an hour?" my husband was asking me, trying to talk me out of going up north to see the turtles.

This was the same man who felt so uncomfortable about my going to the US at seven months pregnant, that I didn't go.

"You kept me from going to the US," I said, "You and everybody else with your nervousness. I'm not going to hang around the house for no reason."

It's amazing how at this stage in the game, nine months, everyone has an opinion about what you should be doing.

Eat spicy food, they tell you, to bring on labor.

I'm Indian and my mother is visiting. It's impossible for me NOT to eat spicy food.

Walk a lot they say.

Since it's Qatar, the mall is the only place to hang out when it's 120 degrees outside. Walking is all there is.

"We'll go to the movies," my husband says, ignoring the fact we've been to three movies this week and watched even more at home.

Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with the idea of staying home. And I called my friend to say I'm going to see the turtles. And if the kid decides to come on the way there or the way back: well then, the hospital bag and car seat I've been driving around with for two weeks will come to good use.

So Sorry Madam, None Available, Fully Booked Madam

This refrain is often what greets you if you call up and try to get a nail appointment on a Friday afternoon. Friday being the first day of the holiday here in Doha, it’s often the afternoon of choice for women to get waxed, washed, and generally buffed up for the weekend. After a frustrating few episodes of this, I caught on and made my booking early in the week or when leaving the previous one (or relying on my friend to make one for both of us after I chewed out the staff on one particularly frustrating incident. But that’s another story).

While beauty appointments are taken so seriously – you can be cancelled if you are more than ten minutes late and relegated to not being seen – I wish the same seriousness would be given to prenatal or doctor’s appointments. You can show up for your appointment thirty, fifteen, or ten minutes early and the result will be the same. You deliver your insurance documents (which they always have to photocopy even in your 9^th month) and wait to be weighed and measured by the nurse. After this initial rush of activity in the first fifteen minutes, you wait. And depending on the time of day, you can wait thirty minutes up to two hours to see the doctor.

Yes, you have an appointment. An appointment that likely took you thirty days to get, despite trying the trick you learned at the nail salon of scheduling your next appointment after your current one.

“The schedule is not ready,” is often the explanation; you’re supposed to call or come back. In a country where women have an average of 4 children (many of them up to 9) the idea that a pregnant woman might have other things to do, concerns she’d like taken seriously, or in general be in need of care does not seem to register – even at the private hospital.

After all the hassle of getting one, your hard won appointment time is just a suggestion. The later in the day you go, the more unlucky you are and the doctor likely to be called away to do an emergency C-section or other equally important duty in the maternity ward. In the last nine months I’ve been told to sit down and wait on the two occasions we could not get anything other than the 8pm appointment slot.

On both instances I went back to the nurse at 9:00 p.m. to ask what was happening.

“There are three people in front of you,” she said once, “the six o’clock person hasn’t been seen yet.”

Did you know that when I was still at my house and coming to the hospital? Could you have called me and told me to bring something to eat? Or that there might be a wait?

What has saved me is actually the wireless access. I now go with my laptop and am able to make some use of the time that otherwise I would spend getting angrier and angrier. I made this discovery during one of the first many long waits on my mobile phone. A few Twitter/Facebook posts later and suddenly Twitter is blocked by the wireless interface. A coincidence?

Doesn’t seem to have affected the position of ‘quality in service’ award in the ironic form of a giant start that I’ve had visions of setting on fire on several of these unbelievably inconsiderate occasions.

Perhaps what is even more frustrating about this hurry up and wait process is that the doctor, scattered and equally unimpressed that you’ve managed to get pregnant, grow a baby, and come down to the hospital to see how it is, spend an average of 15 minutes on you. They do scan the baby much more often here than they do in the US or other places. Many of my friends only saw their uteruses for the first time at twenty weeks. I had a thorough peek during a Friday morning trip to the emergency room when I couldn’t get my period to stop and one every visit since then.

Of the two official ultrasounds they gave us in radiology, the doctor came in and seemed more interested in manipulating the instrument and his charts than telling us anything about what was happening.

This after we had heard the scary words: low placenta and breech position.

I picked up the DVD of the seventh month scan, knowing that family and friends wanted to see the progress of our little one, but the images that our expert had taken were little more than black spots on a grayish screen.

We have an appointment tomorrow and now will likely go once a week. The itchiness has died down which is comforting in terms of the condition they had predicted. The fact we requested a secondary blood test a week ago and they never called back is not.

Being a woman of iron clad convictions and also work schedule, being at the mercy of uncertainty is a new, humbling prospect. I don’t know when or if my water will break.

Will it be at night? And we’ll congratulate ourselves on putting down the shower curtain the midwife recommended so we don’t come back from the hospital to a ‘mangy’ bed.

Will it be at lunch with a friend, or running into someone you’d rather avoid like in the movies?

The prospect of being “late” or going over my due date has me slightly in dread, if only because my return date to work looms before me. As does scheduling a visit by my aunt from India to coincide with my mother and brother being here.

Being in the ninth month is interesting or maybe it’s because I now no longer try to hide the enormous mountain that has become my ‘bump’ because it would be humanly impossible to conceal.

At the bank this week, the manager actually took me out of line to a private counter so I didn’t have to wait. An acquaintance at the grocery store on my behalf yelled at two men who did not pick up something that was knocked down and proceeded to get it for me herself. Even my husband carried heavy parcels after we went to the movies instead of telling me we’d come back later to get the car floor mats I’d wanted for several months.

I’ve even put up a few pictures on Facebook, despite not having done this since month five.

What hasn’t changed is people sharing their opinions of how big or small they think I am.

A colleague walked in for a meeting a few weeks back and said:

“How many months are you?”

“Eight.”

“Oh, you are not that big…”

“We don’t care,” I said, though she was oblivious to what I was saying and kept on sharing her opinion, “pregnant people actually don’t care what you think of our size.”

The woman at our weekend club asked me yesterday “When is it coming out?” Bless her; she’s the one who also said I looked too big at eight months. She just doesn’t really know better I don’t think, so I let it go.

Whatever the reason, the reaction is markedly different now in the home stretch from everyone. They keep saying it’s not far away now. Not knowing when it will be, I can’t really agree or disagree. It could be three more weeks (until the due date) or it could be five, if this guy decides he’s just fine where he is.

I do know that in the middle of the night when I slide out of bed to go to the bathroom, my legs are a lot more unsure than they used to be at the ten, fifteen, even twenty pound stage. Thirty pounds and nine months in, I not only get up early to pee in the morning, I’m now forced to clean out my intestines at least twice a day or risk major discomfort. In other words: my tenant is growing larger and the accommodation is not keeping up.

I do want to tell him that there is more room outside than inside – if judging by his movements (which apparently may not be many more but just felt more by me, the host, since he himself is bigger) he wants to break free.

I’m torn between wanting the baby to come now, so that I can use all seven weeks of maternity leave to get used to him (vice versa for his sake) and looking forward to three weeks of finishing up projects that working for a startup has not allowed me even to ruminate on since March.

My husband is in a full scale panic because we still have not come to agreement on a name. A name, he feels, is essential knowledge prior to driving to the hospital.

Sage is now out because it’s too feminine. Axl had a brief moment of consideration before being grimaced off the list by his co-workers. Riz has been laughed at (means rice in Arabic) by mine. Max I can’t really fathom using in real life and now Solomon, once so noble sounding, seems too formal.

The search and the wait continue. Tomorrow we start the day with a 4D ultrasound which will hopefully yield a photo worthy of sharing until he arrives in person.