Pregnancy In Czech Republic

Whether it's twins or not, whether it's good news or not, after the first ultrasound scan some fathers-to-be fall into a bit of a decline. This Post-Ultrasound Depression, or PUD, as doctors don't call it, is surprisingly common. It is characterized by a sudden realization that your life is going to change utterly, and not necessarily in ways that you had planned. The general whooping and hollering that characterize life as a single man will soon be replaced by early nights and a detailed knowledge of estate cars. These are cliches, I know. They are also true. And this is usually when it all sinks in.
 

Pregnancy In Czech Republic

My working title for this post was 'Drinking For Two' - a phrase I myself used a lot at about this stage in the first pregnancy. Not that alcohol is the solution to everybody's problems. Some men turn to drugs, others work too hard, and one man heard of who was having an affair with his secretary, sacked her, ended the affair, hired a new secretary and started an affair with her, all in the space of a fortnight. In many ways this could be defined as your first real midlife crisis - unless you've had one before, in which case it's your second.

What might help is a holiday, or some other equally pointless expenditure. Which is where the second main scan, at between 16 and 20 weeks, comes in. This is the dating scan, which will give you Junior's ETA. Dating is, of course, approximate - so approximate, in fact, that the due date is virtually the only day in the next seven months on which you can be certain the baby won't be born. Even so, it has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind. Now you know how much time you have left. If you are planning a holiday or fun of any description, this is the official cut-off point. (Incidentally, airlines won't allow pregnant women to sully their planes after the twenty-fifth week, in case they embarrass all the fat men in business class and give birth in the corridor.) So how about a nice little trip to, say ... Prague?

FATHER L (LESTER): Our son was born in the Czech Republic where we lived in the late nineties. It would be fair to say that the health service had not kept pace with other institutions in embracing the changes brought about by the Velvet Revolution of 1989. This was no bad thing in some respects. Medical treatment was still freely available to all, even us foreigners. But it also meant there was a lack of sentimentality about the style of treatment you received. And there was the distinct feeling that while all women were equal, some were more equal than others when it came to being pregnant. Add this to the Czech propensity for calling a spade a spade and a forceps a forceps, while laughing in the face of pain, and you have a recipe for a memorable pregnancy.

A few months down the pregnancy road Lilith had her latest check-up with the kindly but blunt doctor, whose idea of prenatal care was a regime of cold baths, long mountain hikes and eight pints of beer a day. Lilith returned distraught, having been rigorously informed that her blood test showed that she had a more than 80 per cent likelihood of carrying a Down' s syndrome baby. We had to decide whether to have an amniocentesis.
 
At the time, central Prague had two maternity hospitals. Friends had babies in both and recommended neither. We went to the nearest, a large late-nineteenth-century pile of terrifying aspect. There Lilith was whisked into a room for the amniocentesis, which I was allowed to witness. But I was not let into the ward where Lilith was put to recover as it was full of girls who had just had abortions. Just what Lilith needed when she was facing the same experience should the test results prove unfavorable.
 

These results took three weeks to arrive. There was no way they could be processed more quickly, we were told. We would just have to be patient. Unfortunately by this time we knew the sex of our child. Czech is an inflected language and during the scan before the amniocentesis the doctor had referred to our child using the masculine gender. This made the waiting worse. Our son had become suddenly real at the very moment when we were facing the prospect of losing him. The three weeks were a nightmare. Lilith, bravely optimistic, insisted on our arguing about names while I glumly gazed into beer glasses depressing and embarrassing anyone unfortunate enough to come near me. Thankfully at the end of interminable wait the news was good. At last we could look forward to the birth of our son. To find out more, you can check out Pregnancy In Czech Republic.

Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy

GUY: We had a nasty scare with our first daughter. The problems arose from doctors saying things off the cuff without realizing how new parents latch onto them. So at her first scan the doctor said, "Oh yes, her bladder seems rather full, it's possible her kidneys aren't functioning. You'd-better come back for another scan." So you spend two weeks thinking, Oh God, the kidneys aren't functioning. We went back for the second scan, and this time the doctor wrote on his notes, 'possible IUGR'. Only Gina knew what this was, as she was a professional researcher and had therefore looked into all this thoroughly. She was aware that this stood for 'inter-uterine growth retardation'. So we spent the next two weeks thinking, Oh no! Now we're giving birth to a midget. A midget with dodgy kidneys, more to the point. But she was fine, of course.
 

Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy

FATHER K (KARL): We had a nightmare one. The scanner looked at the screen and confidently announced that the foetus had a cyst on it, estimated at 18 centimetres. So we had a fantastic weekend worrying ourselves about that. Then we went back and found that she had misread something and it was 1.8 centimetres, and that actually it had since disappeared - it was a piece of fluff on the screen or something. So we were well chuffed about that. We'd spent the whole weekend thinking about surgical interventions. A weekend in hell.

The medical profession, for all their good intentions, may not be much help. The more they try to reassure you, the more terrified you will become. First-time parents who have fallen into scanning hell truly know the meaning of the word fear. And yet the probabilities involved are usually tiny. 1 in 200 - how much is that? Nothing. Even 1 in 3 means it's less likely to happen than not. But in scanning hell, a tiny chance of something happening always seems to be magnified into a raging certainty. The truth is that most pregnancies are uneventful and completely successful.
 
Even if the probabilities begin to grow, chances are you will have a beautiful and healthy little baby (or at least, as beautiful as your genes will allow it to be). Take, as an example, Down's syndrome. The probabilities rise with the age of the mother, from 1 in 2,000 for a 20-year-old mother to a terrifying 1 in 12 for a 49-year-old.
 
But how many 49-year-olds are having babies? Very few. It's at the very edge of the fertility graph, and yet eleven out of twelve babies conceived by a 49-year-old woman won't have Down's syndrome. I think those are pretty good odds. With screening now almost universal, abnormalities have become rarer than you might think, only around five in every 10,000 births these days are Down's babies. The spina bifida rate is even lower.
 
Far more likely than an abnormality are twins. These will definitely show up on the first scan. Instead of one beating heart, two. Instead of two waggly legs, four. Instead of one willy, one. So it's a boy and a girl then. About 15 births in every 1,000 are multiple births, and the rate is rising - in 1975 it was about 10 in 1,000. Partly this is because of IVF treatments, which commonly plant three little embryos in the womb - and sometimes all three develop. 

A third of all multiple births are triplets or above, although quirts and sextuplets are much rarer than they used to be - the fertility treatments that produced them regularly in the 1960s and 1970s are out of fashion now. Twins mean twice the expense, appalling parental exhaustion and, almost certainly, no more children, because if it has happened once, it may happen again. Watch the face of the man who has just been told by the ultrasound operator that it's twins. The flash of delight across his face registers the huge pride he feels in his own exceptional potency. After 0.0014 of a second this is replaced by gloom and terror, which may mark him permanently. It's not great for the mother, either. Giving birth to the little loves is bad enough. Then there's the breastfeeding, which is apparently like something out of Dante's Inferno. To find out more, you can check out Ultrasound Scan Twin Pregnancy.

How Early Can An Ultrasound Scan Detect Pregnancy

Eventually you are called through. It might be ten minutes, it might be three quarters of an hour, but it'll certainly be long enough for you both to catch at least one of the airborne viruses that breed in the hospital's air-conditioning system. In a small darkened room, the ultrasound operator is waiting with her tube of jelly. 'Lie down here,' she says to your partner. 'Sit down there,' she says to you. There is something of the ritual dance in all this. Your partner lies on the couch. She pulls up her top to reveal the bump. You gasp involuntarily. You haven't seen her show it in public before. 
 

How Early Can An Ultrasound Scan Detect Pregnancy

The ultrasound operator starts squeezing jelly all over the abdomen, then picks up her transducer, a hand-held device that measures high-frequency sound waves bouncing off the womb and the baby's body. It is wired up to a computer monitor which, gadget fans will be disappointed to learn, is only in black-and-white. (Three-dimensional ultrasound is on the way, but as I write it is still too expensive for routine use in NHS hospitals.) 

The ultrasound operator passes the transducer over the abdomen. Ping! Up there on the screen is a baby. Well, not exactly a baby, but a few squiggly lines that might conceivably be a baby if you had the visual imagination of Salvador Dali. There, says the ultrasound operator. If you look carefully you can see its heart beating. And there's its head, and its spine and its little feet and hands ...

'Wow!' you say. 'Isn't that incredible?'

Hmm, you think. Is that all?
 
After the scan is over the Ultrasound operator may offer you a picture. You say yes, because everyone does. It is printed out for you. You express amazement and wonder and awe at this extraordinary technology, which has been around since World War Two. Slightly more advanced technology would print out a picture of a baby that looked like a baby. This looks like the photocopy of a photocopy of an artist's impression of a stoat.

Most parents-to-be will show this photo to friends, relatives and anyone who can't run away quick enough. Other than proving that the baby exists, an ultrasound photo only has one important function: to bring parents-to-be down to earth. Just as you didn't want to know when other people tried to show you their ultrasound photos, so no one else wants to know when you try and show them yours. File it away and forget about it, at least until the child is 16 and can be embarrassed in front of its friends.

This is all flim-flam, anyway. The ultrasound photo, the warm feeling of seeing your progeny's heart beat, the sneaky glances to try and work out whether it has a willy or not, are all just distractions from the main business at hand. The ultrasound, like all other scans and tests, is looking for abnormalities.

All sorts of things can go wrong in pregnancy. Many can be identified early. The latest new test as I write is the nuchal scan, which you can have done at around ten or eleven weeks (i.e. just before the first main ultrasound scan). This measures the thickness of something called the nuchal pad in the baby's neck. If this pad is thicker than it should be, then there is a higher risk of chromosomal defect, which could mean Down's syndrome. 

If that's the case, you move on to the next test, the amniocentesis, which comes at around 15 weeks. For this, they withdraw a sample of the amniotic fluid that surrounds the foetus in the womb. They don't touch the baby, but the test does carry around a 1 in 200 risk of miscarriage. That's how risks become quantified in this game - 1 in 200, 1 in 100, 1 in 50, 1 in 10. As you go through each test, so the probabilities seem to grow, and you stop sleeping at night. To find out more, you can check out How Early Can An Ultrasound Scan Detect Pregnancy.

Waiting For Scan Early Pregnancy

GUY: I think I was early well disposed to the bump. I don't remember feeling jealous at any stage, or anything like that. I think I was worried that I would have to do more during Gina's pregnancy. My strategy was to treat her as if absolutely nothing had changed, in the hope that she would continue as if absolutely nothing had changed, and therefore I wouldn't have to do any more than I previously had done. l just about got away with that. Fortunately Gina is quite robust, and she wasn't really inclined to be too self indulgent about pregnancy, either. So I think we did, both of us, take the view, let's try and get on with life as much as normal, and luckily that was reasonably OK. 

Waiting For Scan Early Pregnancy

FERGUS: I found the bump creepy. Made me think of Alien. I found it increasingly hard to contemplate even the idea of having sex. Completely put off it. Because it was like this thing was there, that it was sitting up there, waiting. You were just visualizing where you were ... going, and there was this head up them, not far away. I didn't like it at all. I find pregnant women ugly, undoubtedly. Unless they're semi-clad and posing for Pregnancy magazine. Even then they're not great.

And then there are the scans. Fathers-to-be, in this relatively early stage of pregnacy, will normally know little about scans, other than (a) there will be some, and (b) they will be expected to be there. Anything else you probably don't want to know, because most scans don't give you good news, they just give you the absence of bad news. They exist to foretell trouble. Some people don't want trouble to be foretold, and they tend to avoid scans altogether. If you have a stronger objection to abortion than you have to birth defects, this is probably a wise course of action. 

Most parents-to-be, though, accept the usefulness of scans and so will be trooping along to the ultrasound department of their local hospital after twelve weeks or so. For some it will be the first scan of many. Indeed, a few will develop a real taste for the procedure and become scanaholics. The NHS doesn't seem to mind. So nervous is the medical profession of producing a baby that is less than 100 per cent perfect, that if there's even the slightest hint of a problem, they will suggest scans, scans and more scans.
 
It will also be your first encounter with the great medicalisation of birth. This is a much stranger and more surprising business than you may have imagined. After all, most of our received ideas about birth do involve doctors and nurses and machines that go bleep. In all films and TV series, birth lasts about a minute and a half and involves about two thirds of the hospital's staff. And yet, as you sit in the ultrasound waiting area with other anxious couples, it may occur to you that neither of you is actually ill. Even so, hospitals can undermine the most vigorous feelings of good health. 

As you wait, doctors stomp importantly through corridors, carrying files. Nurses ignore you. Receptionists make it clear that you are wasting their valuable time. Even the cleaning staff look at you askance. Like all patients, you are in their way. How much more efficiently they could run the place if it weren't for all these ill people sitting on chairs and taking up space. After a while you might even find yourself coughing quietly, as though showing symptoms of illness will get you seen more quickly. (You'll know about this if you have ever spent any time waiting to be treated in A&E. Everyone exaggerates the pain and/or discomfort of their injuries in order to see a doctor before they die of old age.) To find out more, you can check out Waiting For Scan Early Pregnancy.

What Do Men Think Of Pregnancy

Other men, by contrast, feel excluded. They are not even halfway through the pregnancy, which itself is just a brief preliminary phase in the long horror of parenthood - and already they seem to have been left behind. The bond between mother-to-be and baby-to-be is profound and unbreachable. These men look at the bump with suspicion. It mocks them silently. It knows it will be getting all the milk, and they won't. 
 

What Do Men Think Of Pregnancy

Between these two extremes are multifarious shades of grey, because everyone reacts differently to the arrival of the bump. You may love the woman but hate the bump. You may hate the woman but love the bump. You may love them both (hooray!).

You may have just packed your suitcase and arranged to have your name changed by deed poll. Anything is possible. Oddly enough, it has nothing to do with whether you thought you wanted children or not, but then, as must now be coming clear, your preconceptions have a nasty habit of being overtaken by events. What is certain is that men who are virulently antiparenthood can be converted almost instantaneously into cooing devoted uberdads. Do not underestimate the power of the bump. Accepting its influence, and realizing that you now want to write one of those soppy newspaper columns about how great it is to be a dad, can be a humbling experience.
 
And as all the books say, you can never start bonding with your baby too early. It may only be the size of a fat hamster, but it will know when you are fondling the bump, just as it will know when mama is watching EastEnders (it will dance to the theme tune). Babies can hear sounds outside the womb from about five or six months. Talk to the blighter and it will come to recognize your voice (it can hear your gravelly male tones more clearly than its mother's squeakier range). 

Coo and make stupid noises, having ensured that there are no hidden tape-recorders or cameras recording it all for posterity. Massage the bump gently and, dare I say it, sensuously. You could use the inner tube of a toilet roll to listen to its heartbeat. There are hours of innocent fun to be had, and not-so-innocent fun, if you can talk her into it.
 
I asked the fathers how they had felt towards the bump.

IVAN: I loved the bump, I thought the bump was brilliant. You hear a lot of stories about men freaking out because their wives or partners were pregnant and feeling threatened by it, I didn't feet that at all. I thought it was absolutely wonderful. I thought it made Imogen incredibly attractive, that whole bloom of impending motherhood. I actually found it very, very sexy. What could be more natural, what could be more magical? And it was magical. And as it got bigger, and you got kicked in bed in the middle of the night by it ... it was great.
 
CLIFF: I'm not very keen on babies. No, let's start at the beginning. I'm very unkeen on pregnant women. It's almost a phobia. Like spiders. I remember, as a younger man, crossing the street to avoid pregnant women. So to be actually living with one was slightly scary. So I'm not sure I was wildly enthusiastic about being asked to put my ear to her stomach and seeing if I could hear things ...

I think I was scared of fatherhood, certainly of being a father of a baby. I didn't think I'd be able to cope very well. And, frankly, I was right.

ERNIE: I felt incredibly horny. In fact I still swear I knew she was pregnant before she did, because the whole sex thing was very, very different. Of course you can rationalize all that afterwards, but it felt different. Especially as Eva didn't get big at all ...
 

I was desperately interested in kicking, movement, the position it was in. Also a bit worried because Eva insisted on keeping her bellybutton ring in throughout. Because bellybuttons often invert during pregnancy. So I was always expecting it to pop out in a fairly dramatic fashion, and fly across the room. It never happened, to my chagrin. To find out more, you can check out What Do Men Think Of Pregnancy.