 |
| 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.