My sister was right to go through my OB practice. I was due today for my progesterone shot. My doctor’s nurse (the one I referred to a few posts ago, whose sister-in-law and brother lost their baby) asked how I was doing. I was just honest, and told her I’m anxious because we still don’t have answers about my platelets, and that I’d gotten an ultrasound yesterday of my abdomen. Immediately, even before I finished the story, she said, “Let’s go look at these ultrasound results–but don’t tell anyone I let you see them.” She, by the way, is also the nurse I yelled at over my headache a few weeks ago, but since it turned out that that was legitimately bad, and since we talked about her brother and his wife, she’s been a great ally. So my situation’s not entirely dire. I feel so relieved that I can be myself in front of her, and not be judged unfairly. She printed out the U/S results and said she’d make sure Dr. H looks at them this afternoon, as well as the CBC results from my tests at the other doctor’s office. If Dr. H thinks this is something that can’t wait until next Wednesday, she’ll call me. So, progress, and I’m confident that if I don’t hear from them, it’s not something that demands immediate treatment or response.

A few people have written to tell me about their friends who had low platelets in pregnancy. This problem has come to light because I have an attentive OB practice, but it actually is separate from, although probably aggravated by, my pregnancy. So it’s a bit more complicated. I’ve been preparing myself to hear the worst, not because I’m a pessimist but because I haven’t really found it helpful to assume the best. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than shocked.

Even before my shot, I found it easier today to not think about my anxieties than I would have imagined when I was beside myself yesterday. That’s the benefit of letting myself get REALLY UPSET about something rather than trying to relax and not think about it. I sometimes think I must seem hysterical to those who don’t know me well (and sometimes to those who do). Yet it really does help for me to give in briefly to my worst fears, and any anger that comes with them. Losing it for a few minutes is such a release. Letting myself acknowledge that I feel hopelessness at times helps me get past it and keep going. I think I should write the Anti-Secret and or finally should at least read Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided.

It’s obvious that my immune system is compromised. I was really pissed off to find out that signs were apparent, if minor, in 2009. Because I have been struggling with energy and have been getting colds and other illnesses more often than used to be normal for me. I had a much harder time getting over the dog bite than I should have considering I was on antibiotics. This could all be related. After the doctors in Ohio effectively dismissed me, I just accepted that it’s all situational, or emotional, that I’ve just been struggling to adjust to my new surroundings, to the stress of my first year teaching (in OH) or to the unease I have living here. I thought it was because I’d quit working out, so I started going to boot camp workouts (which actually helped a lot, but then the dog, then the pregnancy.) And my issues haven’t been constant, just enough to really irritate me and make things tough. Speaking of which, I’m really tired right now. Too tired to proofread this post. Off to rest for a few before I pick up the room in anticipation of Samuel’s arrival home.

More disturbing? The bloodwork from 2009, when I lived in Ohio, showed low platelets. So this is a long term condition, predating my pregnancy. What’s funny about that is NO ONE SAID ANYTHING back then. During the fall of 2009, I had a few episodes where I was horribly, miserably sick with pain and digestive issues. I even went to the ER in the middle of the night. Diagnosis: nothing. Maybe an ovarian cyst. No mention of anything looking off in a test at all. Although a radiology tech told me she saw a strange “shadow” near my gall bladder but then the doctors said that was nothing. I was really miserable a lot for a month or so, but then it was gone. Although I have needed more sleep, have felt more tired, and have had more of a tendency to feel down and lethargic since around then than would have been my old normal, I didn’t have any more episodes of massive pain. Of course, we’ve had major life changes since then, including moving to the South, where I often feel like an unwelcome foreigner. So who knows what’s what here. I could be writing a cause backward, or these things could be related.

So why the title of this post? I also had an ultrasound today of my abdomen. I don’t know the results yet, but the tech mentioned my liver was “not really bad.” I asked what she meant, and she said, “It’s not the biggest I’ve seen; it’s about 17.” I asked what that meant, and then she hedged a bit saying, “it’s hard to tell because your uterus could be affecting its shape,” and then nothing. This was at the radiology center, before I went into the doctor’s office and had the better CBC. I had my blood drawn, and then we were sitting in the hallway. The doctor came along and told me my CBC looked better but that he had my records from 2009. He said we’d talk about it next week when we have all the records gathered. I tried to express how nervous I was about the U/S results, and he said he’d have to get the radiologist report first. We were in the hall, with other people, other patients milling by. So here’s where I miss being up north, and especially in Michigan.

This is going to sound crazy to northern readers and probably to southern ones, and maybe even to other transplants. But one of my biggest issues here has been my inability to communicate. Seriously. Obviously we all speak English–I’m not talking about that. But there are ways of doing things down here that confuse me, make me unsure of how to navigate situations. Things turn abrasive, unpleasant far more quickly than I can understand. Supposedly Southerners are more polite, but I’ve had more bewildering responses to simple comments just in the 1.5 years I’ve lived here than I have had in my entire life. That estimate includes my two years in Israel and my visit to Russia. I’ve majorly pissed people off just by asking for whip cream on my hot chocolate after I ordered it that way and it came without. I don’t like going into my bank anymore because of a confrontation with an employee there when I simply asked her why their website isn’t compatible anymore with Quicken. I swear I did these things politely-I’ve had no history of unpleasant confrontations before and I’m used to being considered very smiley and friendly. It seems the local culture doesn’t take well to “complaints,” even when actually they’re just what I’d see as inquiries. 

So, I’m not happy about waiting until next Wednesday to hear the results of the ultrasound given the tech’s comments. Really not happy. I’ve spent all day trying not to continually google terms about large livers and low platelets, although I have done a little. They’re not happy searches. Anyone would be nervous of course. But combining this with a high risk pregnancy, where I’m sedentary and alone with my thoughts so much anyway? Combining this with trying to teaching next week, when I’m already anxious to not be doing that, and extremely nervous about how I’ll manage 7 and a half hours of lecturing by sitting in a chair? I really feel like it’s too much for me to bear. I feel really close to my personal edge. Which I know is presumptuous given that there are cancer patients every day in the hematologist’s waiting room, some of whom look really, really sick. As well as all the other typically really sick Mississippians milling about. 

If I were back in Michigan, or Boston, or IL, I feel like I’d know what to do. I’d call up the doctor’s receptionist and honestly plead my case. But when I call up someone here, the most likely result is that I’ll have to repeat myself at least twice because they never understand me. And then, they’ll likely think I’m demanding something special and criticizing some policy, rather than pleading fear and vulnerability. And finally, appointments for anything are tougher to come by here, so they really might not have anything. 

Not to mention the biggest kicker, despite being faculty at a major research university, our insurance is abysmal, and every time I whine myself into an extra appointment, we’re set back a few hundred dollars. So I have to wonder, is my fear and paralysis worth that, when we’re only just now earning a little more than we spend? Would it make any difference in the long run in terms of treatment and response? Seriously, my pregnancy already cost $2000 last year just to get out of the first trimester, after insurance paid its paltry amount (and don’t ask what the premiums are) and that was with only one panic-induced appointment. The clock started over on January 1st. Have I mentioned before I think insurance companies are criminals?

Update: I’m going to take my sister’s suggestion and call the OB nurse tomorrow, tell her how anxious I am, and see if that’ll get a phone call from my ob/gyn to speed up the appointment. She agreed (and has reason to know these things) that I’ll likely not get very far calling a receptionist who doesn’t really know my history.

Phew. Huge, huge relief.

No new news in terms of me and my platelets. But they were low in the first CBC, 115,000, just not low enough to worry about at that point. So it’s been downward continually since Sept. So we’ll see.

I should know better than to be so sure of something.

I am really worried. This time, I’m not only worried about the baby’s health and survival, but my own. This problem doesn’t seem to have first appeared during pregnancy. The first indication something was off was after the dog bite, when I came down with the more serious infection. Blood tests also showed my platelets were down to 125,000, from the normal of 150-400,000. A short term drop can happen after a trauma in which you lose a lot of blood, so when I began to feel better, my GP didn’t pursue it. And I didn’t think to mention it to my OB. I just realized in typing this, that no one’s mentioned what my platelets were at when I had my first blood work done during this pregnancy. I think I’ll ask today. The possibilities are so wide, there’s still no point in commenting upon them specifically, but since even the mildest problem isn’t minor, these next few weeks are going to be really, really hard.

I also began this pregnancy with a concern not entirely based upon reason. After the dog bite, I was on doxycycline and another antibiotic (and had a really lovely full blown allergic reaction to it). Doxycycline is NOT recommended for pregnant women, but well, given my dates, it really didn’t seem possible that I’d be pregnant. I was, though, about 24 hours pregnant at the time. Apparently, my entirely reliable cycle did something really wonky in September. Ironically, when the dog bite first happened and my doctor gave me the doxy and told me not to get pregnant, I was seriously disappointed because I thought September was the perfect month to try–a June due date would be ideal. Ha.

Warning: DO NOT tell me this is an indication that this pregnancy was meant to be. I find that really, really annoying and presumptuous. I also don’t like to be told people “know” things will go well or that God has a plan for something/someone. All this means is that the doctor and I should not have assumed anything.

Anyway, doxycycline. It’s probably fine. Most of the warnings say to avoid it later in pregnancy because it affects teeth development (the baby’s teeth will be yellow). One study showed a slight statistical chance that bone development could be affected, leaving the baby with arms that end below the elbows. So I’m damn anxious to see this child’s hands at the anatomical scan (which is today, by the way) at 2:30. I should not worry about it, but I have been.

And for the final concern, at my last cervical ultrasound last week, my cervix measured 3.45cm. I don’t like that number. I was at over 4cm until well over 30 weeks with Samuel. My doctor reassured me that she’s not worried, and told me that my bladder, has dropped, which is very normal in a 3rd pregnancy to get well into the second trimester, and especially when Samuel was so big. She’s the voice of evidence-based medicine. I’m the voice of, well someone has to be the unlucky one, and I’m waiting for the more reliable personal evidence: what length is my cervix today? If it’s not changing, as it shouldn’t be at this stage, I’ll accept that my bladder dropping just means it’s shorter in the first place, not opening.

So….this is not my most creative post. It’s more of a ranting list of worries.

That said, I have one good thing to report. I am thinking my placenta is not on the front of my uterus again as it was with Samuel, because I can actually feel some kicking at times. Last time, I rarely felt anything, which didn’t help much at all with my anxiety.

I noticed the doctor asked me three times when I’m due. I wish I could be an optimist and figure this will work out, but if I’m honest with myself, I’m not confident. 

As if the middle second trimester of a pregnancy doesn’t suck enough for me. I wish I had more of that courage someone once accused me of.

One last thing–I didn’t publish this post really widely on Facebook. I’m feeling a bit reticent until I know more. If you can see this, it’s because I specifically chose to let you see it.

 Rose told me one story that I appreciated, but didn’t ask much about, because it didn’t really touch me then. I wish now that I had asked more. She had been active in the Israeli feminist movement. She had formed a coalition with a number of Orthodox women to get rid of advertising posters plastered on the bus stops and kiosks around Israel which they considered pornographic and dehumanizing. She, as a woman and an artist, was disgusted by images of scantily clad or unclad women’s body parts being used to sell beverages, cigarettes, and other random products in the 1970s and 80s. The coalition was (temporarily) successful in setting public standards and rules for advertising. She was a leftist, Atheist, independent and outspoken woman. I thought of her as uncompromising, and yet she managed to work with and form a successful coalition with women who were very much her opposite.

I am thinking about Rose right now in part because today marks 5 years since Natan’s death. I’ve never really known what to do with the day (I don’t like to read/hear “birthday” greetings, and I’ve never wanted to make a cake). Every year since then, we were somehow bogged down with a major work/school event: the annual job-search conference or the start of a semester. Soon we’ll be on the road, driving back from seeing family. I’d pretty much like for the day to just fly by without notice. 

But since I don’t pretend it didn’t happen, since our lives are more settled and I’m thinking more and more about how January 3, 2007 changed me, I decided to expend some lines thinking more about what I wish I could do with the experience. I wish I could figure out how to bridge the divides between people over women’s health and reproduction. I wish I could talk to Rose about ideas on how to do that with the talents that I do have.

On my last post, a few friends chimed in with their thoughts about why friends and neighbors of the couple I described might have felt justified verbally attacking them. Angela and Rachel pointed to the tactics of anti-abortion groups, and questions of selective or insufficient understandings of the science of reproduction and the real options women have when they face complications in pregnancy. Courtney described misogyny, and the many ways a woman, in the eyes of others, loses primacy of self and bodily integrity when she becomes or decides to try to become pregnant. I certainly think the points have large grains of truth in them. But I don’t think they show us a way out. It’s also important to me that the pro-choice movement isn’t exactly golden, either. (I can say more about that later; it would take a lot of space.)

Those of us who lost babies to prematurity get wrapped up in this discussion for so many reasons. Ironically, the very advances in the treatment of preterm birth and preterm labor that I celebrate create some of the problems for those of us whose children didn’t survive. From the cutsie Cabbage Patch “preemie” dolls of the 1980s to the twenty-plus weekers featured in People Magazine to the birth of Josie Duggar, to the multitude of stories of women being told they’re in PTL or their cervixes have shortened and yet they make it term anyway, popular culture promotes the happy endings and the other ones vanish from polite conversation.

Certainly the news stories mention statistics. Yet somehow unless you’re listening to a doctor quote them about your own child’s chances, it’s not easy to comprehend fully what it means that a baby born between 20 and 22 weeks has at best a 10% chance of survival. From there the numbers don’t reach 50% until 25 weeks, and 90% at 28 weeks. That means someone has to be on the wrong side of all those statistics. Someone has to be in the 90%, the 50%, and the 10%, not to mention the multitude of health problems and disabilities that plague most survivors before 32 weeks.

The people who end up unlucky can’t always be easily distinguished from the lucky ones in terms of their behavior before the birth, although they may very well differ from one another in terms of where they live and what they can afford, and thus they might have very different levels of access to healthcare and medical expertise. It is inevitable that many pregnancies will end without a living child.

Yet I would like to think that we could at least try to do everything humanly possible to improve those statistics, that we could find a better way to take care of pregnant women and children no matter who they are, where they live, and what conditions they’re living in. I’d like to think the better way wouldn’t demonize women and might also involve useful conversations about sex in culture. I’d especially like to think we could take a broader view of women’s reproductive health that wouldn’t be so easily polarized around the issue of elective abortion. I’d like to think we could see our current fights over abortion as the symptom of a few problems—first, that women and children (really, people in general) are not valued highly by American culture and society; and second, that we are too quick to look for ways to blame people for their own suffering. Feel free to add others.

I’d like to think that those of us who feel passionately about women’s reproductive health and children should all share, I think we could all share, a few common goals: making sure that many many more children born in this country are wanted, that many many more children born in this country survive and are cared for, and that many many more mothers survive and thrive after their pregnancies. I think our current abortion debate and our debates over the economy (part of the so-called culture wars) only succeed in making it impossible for us to move forward as much as really ought to be possible given our scientific and medical knowledge. We’re not doing a good enough job at giving girls, women, and children sufficiently fair access to high quality obstetric and gynelogical care no matter who they are and where they live in this country. Why wouldn’t we want to do that? I’m not saying give them all cars and mansions—just access to knowledge about their bodies, and to skilled doctors and nurses and well equipped hospitals. I want to imagine a coalition of women from multiple faiths, backgrounds and political leanings, talking about pregnancy and women’s healthcare without falling into the trenches of the abortion debates, or culture wars.  When it comes to the real options we have for saving women and children, those of us who really care really ought to be on the same side. 

I’ve been deeply upset by an experience my doctor’s nurse shared with me the other day. She wanted to know why I’d chosen to go with a compounded version of 17-P, rather than the Makena, the KV Pharmaceuticals version. Scroll back a few posts and you can see how I feel about the company. Read this story for an update: http://www.forbes.com/sites/edsilverman/2011/12/14/going-going-gone-kv-pharma-sinks-under-its-troubles/. In all honesty, I wouldn’t choose to sacrifice my pregnancy and this baby if my concerns with KV were simply political. I’d take whatever drugs would save it. I don’t trust the company or its products and feel safer knowing that a local compounding pharmacist, who my doctor has been using for years and who she trusts over KV (something she told me after I made my feelings clear), will be mixing up the drug that I believe brought us Samuel alive and full term.

In talking about 17-P, the nurse told me that her brother-in-law and wife lost a baby girl last fall and are considering their treatment options for a subsequent pregnancy. Here’s where the conversation got loaded. I asked her what happened. She told me her sister-in-law’s cervix completely opened, her “bag was bulging” (meaning the membranes of the amniotic sac were exposed), at around 16 weeks, well before viability. She was at an earlier gestation with her baby than I was with Natan, where we’d passed into week 24 when I was hospitalized, and we made it to the end of week 25 before all hell really broke lose. The baby was not viable. I feel like that has to be repeated. The baby could not survive out of her mother’s womb. She’d also developed an infection–the biggest risk to both mother and child. Antibiotics didn’t work. Her health was at great risk, her reproductive organs were at risk, and they were too far from viability to wait it out. She also developed a leak in her amniotic sac.

She and her husband wanted this baby. Her family was so excited–she was supposed to be the first grandchild. But, they had to terminate the pregnancy. Even I can’t imagine the misery and heartbreak involved in making that decision.

I remember the moment the doctors told me I was in preterm labor very clearly. I said to them, “I want to do whatever it takes to save this baby. I know it might have severe cerebral palsy, or worse, at this stage, but I want us to try.” Later on, the doctors told me how “brave” I was being, how impressed they were at how much I seemed to understand my medical condition, the baby’s chances, how clearly I made my decisions. Honestly, that was a facade. I had no choices, but I wanted to feel in control. It wasn’t brave to say I wanted my baby to live–it was instinctual. Natan was just past the point of viability–I was lucky in a sense that there wasn’t a choice to be made, so it was easy to say “try everything.” It wasn’t easy to experience everything, certainly, but as long as there were options for saving him, I had reason to hope. 

I can’t imagine being told there’s no hope left for my very wanted child, whose heart is still beating, a heartbeat I’ve seen and heard. Natan died before my hope was gone.

Thus, I really cannot imagine what the nurse’s brother and sister-in-law went through–how they felt making the choice to follow the doctor’s recommendation and following through with it. How it felt to leave the hospital and face the real world again. 

Thus far, this story isn’t different from others I’ve heard before, from what close friends of mine have experienced. The next part, however, goes beyond the pale. The family told most people that they’d lost the baby. Somehow, however, it leaked that they’d terminated because of an infection threatening the mother’s life if the pregnancy continued. To make a sad story worse, this happened right as the fighting over the “Personhood Amendment” raged on in the fall.

The family apparently lived in a particularly conservative area of Mississippi, and attended a particularly conservative church. They’ve lost almost all of their “friends,” and were forced to change their phone numbers and shut down their Facebook pages because of harassing messages calling them “murderers” and “babykillers.” They’ve been told the mother should’ve died trying to save her a baby, that it’s clear she’s not a real mother, that God is going to punish them. The grandparents have been targeted too, and they’ve lost lifelong friends. They don’t feel like they can go out in public in their small town, and are trying to move.

I’m not trying to be sensational, and I’m well aware that many people who think they wouldn’t make a similar choice would never be so awful to another person. Yet this story shocks me and has haunted me for days. I simply cannot imagine living in and being part of such a horribly cruel and heartless community. Yet it exists, not very far away from where I live now.

My sister, when I told her about it, said to me, something like, “Some people just can’t accept that bad things happen for no reason; they just have to blame some one.” She’s right. I suppose if you have to have blame someone, and you can’t blame God, humans are another option. I choose neither. 

As medicine stands now, no person could save that couple’s baby. People, however, could have tried to comfort them, to help them heal. Instead they chose to hurt them further. That I cannot imagine.

So how serious could it have been? Really serious, from nothing to a spinal headache to sepsis. The latter two are rare complications, but I’m not exempt from that. 

I didn’t get a call back after 30 minutes. I called again, after my sister affirmed I should take it seriously. I also threw up again. This time, only the office staff was in, so I left a message for a nurse. No call back after 30 minutes. Called again, and this time I said I needed to talk to someone not leave a message. My doctor’s out of town, but I got her nurse on the phone. She suggested some caffeine. By that point my head was really, really bad,even keeping my eyes open felt like torture. I seriously lost it then, and as often happens down here, the nurse couldn’t understand my accent under stress. So I passed the phone to Josh, and she again suggested caffeine. He didn’t take that well, and I yelled at her from the background. Honestly I can’t exactly remember what happened next, but I know I said that this was really serious and they would either see me at the office or I would go to the ER. I don’t know why I thought that was a threat but by then I was a serious mess. I still did not want to go to the ER just randomly because it would involve lots of explanation, and I still wasn’t confident about their prep for dealing with high-risk pregnancies. Anyway, shortly after that my doctor’s partner called me back and asked me to come in right away. It took about 2.5 hours from my first phone call to being seen. 

It should’ve gone faster, but this is a small town, and I did get to the head of the queue when I got there. When I walked in to the office, it was really apparent that I wasn’t okay. He thought perhaps I had a spinal headache. It’s really hard to explain what that feels like, but apparently people who get serious migraines would have some idea. It felt like the world was crushing in on me, darkness smashing in from the front and sides of my head, while someone punched me at the base of my skull. I couldn’t see well and the pain radiated down my back and into my hips and legs. Lying down in a dark room made it a little bit better. Apparently lying down relieves the spinal headache, but the stress of the headache can trigger other headaches.

He sent me to the hospital, to see the anesthesiologist. Again with the waiting, and I was in bad shape. Samuel was done with daycare by then, so he and Josh were in the waiting room with me. They went off to get some lunch, and I sat on the couch wishing I could kill every person who spoke in my vicinity. The light and sound was unbearable. And the guy who came in talking loudly after smoking a cigarette? I really had unkind thoughts about him and was glad I’d already lost all the food I’d eaten recently.

When they got back, I was still in the waiting room. Josh went to desk and managed to get me to a room right away. Fast forward, I did have a spinal headache caused by spinal fluid leaking out of the puncture from the anesthesia on Wednesday, which in cases like mine where it’s getting worse should be treated with an epidural blood patch, which is less pleasant as it sounds. They took blood from my arm and shot it into my back with an epidural needle. The shot hurt like hell, and the sensation it produced in my back and nervous system was cold and gooey. That makes no sense but I don’t how else to describe it. It was weird. But it helped, a lot, and almost immediately. Yesterday and today I still have a dull headache, but the pain is gone. My back hurt terribly yesterday, like it was bruised from the inside out. Today it’s better.

Lessons? First, I really have to be pushy here. Second, I really hope I can avoid an epidural during delivery. For no other reason than that I do not want to go through that again.

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I thought about not posting this experience, because this complication really rarely happens and is really rarely this bad. I don’t want to scare people or spark a debate about the risks and benefits of spinal anesthesia. I had to have it for the cerclage and would do it again for that. But then I thought, you know, this blog is about me dealing with rare complications that rarely happen, and about holding on to hope and humor throughout them.

Since then, I’ve written a few posts on the same topic, but really, it’s only been lately that my understanding of myself since that time has become clearer. It’s been muddled considerably by the reality of the recession, which greatly altered Josh’s and my prospects for dual academic careers. I would have hated the idea that that could happen five years ago–that Natan’s life/death could become mixed up in something so mundane. I really wanted his life to have some higher spiritual meaning. But really, why? Do I put such high pressure on Samuel? No. Do I expect his life to be for the sake of feeding my cosmology? Not really. I just love him, and genuinely like him, a lot.

I continue to resist any suggestion that things “happen for a reason” or “always work out for the best” because if that were true, I’d have too much trouble reconciling my faith with the really ugly, or what I more often experience, the really annoying. I still hope I can do more to help the world and be a better person because of what I went through, just as I hope living with Samuel will also help me push myself more. 

The truth is though, I’ve accomplished a lot less since Natan died than I expected to have done. Four and a half years ago, I had no higher ambition than to be an academic and a great teacher. Those are great ambitions, and I don’t have reduced admiration for people who do that. Something I resisted though, really until recently, was the reality that the mix of experiences I’ve had since January 2007 changed me so much that I’m not suited for it anymore. I can’t pinpoint what came from my failed pregnancy, from Natan’s death, from Samuel’s birth and life, from the dehumanizing aspects of the market, from our financial struggles, from my unsatisfactory experiences in academia since I defended. I should point out that I have had plenty of wonderful experiences as well, but somehow those have really, really not felt like enough. I complain a lot about the tedium of grading, dealing with annoying or problem students, and boredom with scholarship in my field. Lots of people do the first two–the real problem for me comes with the last one. 

For a long time, when I pick up an article or book in my field, I’ve felt complete and utter disinterest. I was telling Josh recently that I came to graduate school with certain questions that only early American cultural history could answer for me. My dissertation provided me with those answers, and I’m on to new questions, but they’re not the ones I can answer by being a history professor. And I’m not sure I care whether anyone else was interested in those historical questions and whether my dissertation answers the questions they had. And I can’t seem to care enough to fake it.

That was an entirely vague paragraph, but it’s the best I can do without getting into details about my diss and what I think it did. I think I’m simply not interested in the profession. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion, because in no way do I think I should have quit graduate school or not finished my dissertation. It also took a long time, because, well, what else have I been trained to do? A well-meaning person recently forwarded me something about things to do with your history PhD other than be a history professor. My reaction, “Ugh, those are even worse.” I was a great student, yet I don’t like working with other people very much. I’m much happier in my own head, or more accurately, sitting at a computer with a cup of coffee, at home or in a coffee shop, with no one else’s expectations surrounding me and no need to bend to another person’s whims. Obviously, life doesn’t work like that. But my hope is I can find a way to live like that more often than not. 

So here goes–my craziest confession yet. I’m going to finish out this academic year where I am, obviously continuing to do the best I can by the department and my students. Then, I’m done. We’ve, through some incredible good fortune, managed this year to pay off our most considerable debts, and can afford to live frugally for the next couple of years as a one-income family. My plan: write. I have a number of ideas, all of which are crazy, none of which may work out. I have a good amount done on one of them, but with a job and a family, it’s too much to just finish without bowing out on one of those things. 

And while I’m at it, I’ll admit some other big recent news. I am 14 weeks pregnant and had a cerclage yesterday. All went well. It’s very very different being in Mississippi rather than Michigan, but my doctor’s competent and I like her. I did have to put up with a number of idiotic questions from nursing staff, “Is this your first?” First what?? “Baby.” No, of course not. No one has a cerclage put in at 14 weeks with their first. The surgery was done in the general operating room because it’s a small hospital, without room in L&D. But let’s just pray I don’t have to visit the general areas again because my patience really began to wear thin. 

Your stance that you have reservations about the amendment, but ultimately support it, is more offensive to me than wholehearted support would be, because such complete support might imply not being aware of the possible issues with it, or at least it implies an intellectual consistency. Your position dismisses entire segments of Mississippi’s population who have suffered, and will suffer more under this amendment. You say you realize there may be problems, but essentially dismiss them. My faith also privileges life above all else, and thus informs my belief that this amendment is irresponsible, dangerous, and immoral.

I am a woman of childbearing age, with one living son, and one deceased, who understands very personally the stakes of this debate. My oldest son died after a traumatic preterm delivery, a delivery I fought in the hospital for more than a week, and that I did nothing to cause. When I read doctor’s comments that they’re concerned that this will lead to investigation and prosecutions of women (like me!) for the loss of their pregnancies and wanted children, that it might prevent Mississippians with fertility problems from getting medical care accepted everywhere else in this country, and that it might make certain forms of birth control illegal, I am appalled. I am frightened for the effects such an investigation could have on a family, and by the effects such a law could have on the decisions doctors make to save women’s lives and reproductive organs. It is positively callous to support an amendment when you admit to being unsure of its possible legal effects.

I am a lifelong Democrat, but you have gone too far. I will not vote for you in the upcoming election despite my even greater dislike for Phil Bryant. I am done voting against my best interests because of my fear of a greater evil. I will write in the name of a person I can support. If I can crudely paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller, I now feel like you have joined the crowd of Personhood USA, who first came for women who wanted abortions, then for women who needed abortions, and are now coming for all women. But I am not really concerned for myself. I have health insurance, and the means to leave this state if necessary. This amendment will hurt women and families, and will not protect children. And the guilt will rest with all of Mississippi.

Yet it will rest even more so with our leaders, who take weak stances on moral issues and refuse to investigate and stand up for what’s right for all citizens.

Best regards,
sbf