The Waiting Game

In my life right now, there is a spectacular amount of interesting stuff that is about to happen.  And what that really means is that none of it is happening right now.  Right now, I am just waiting.  Waiting to find out where I matched for residency (and all that entails), waiting to find out how much maternity leave my residency program will give me, waiting to graduate, waiting for my family drama to get better, waiting to meet this little person I’m growing in my abdomen.

I’m not a good waiter.  I’m on the cusp of all this life-changing, interesting stuff, but right now I am mostly just bored and frustrated.

Picking up where I left off yesterday: after interviews are over, the Match starts.  You (the applicant) rank the programs in order of preference and enter them into the National Residency Match Program (NRMP) website.  They give you several weeks to agonize over this list and make changes before locking it down in February.  I changed mine three or four times.  It was just tortuous. 

The programs, meanwhile, are making a ranked list of applicants, in a process that I can only imagine is more tortuous, as it involves group decision-making.  They enter these into the NRMP website as well.  And then the computer runs an algorithm and spits out a letter that tells you where to move.  Theoretically, the algorithm is applicant-centered and attempts to give all the applicants the highest ranked program possible. 

If you want to see how it works, a fairly good explanation is here http://www.scutwork.com/cgi-bin/links/page.cgi?page=Algorithm

I like how they stress over and over that you should rank programs according to your true preference.  As if “true preference” is totally obvious to everyone.  But really, how do you weigh “close to my family,” when that family is only 17% speaking to you?  How do you weigh, “I feel comfortable around these residents,” when you can’t ask them how they would feel about you having a baby as an intern?

Whatever, there is nothing else I can do about it now.  I just have to breathe deep (increasingly difficult) and wait for Friday.

Sixteen Breaths

Today at the grocery store, my husband barked at me for picking up a bag of candy off of the belt in the self-check line and making the automated voice lady all cranky-pants (“if you wish to purchase the item, please place the item on the belt.”)  I spun on my heel to face him and said, “don’t talk to me that way.”  I thought I was going to actually shoot lasers out of my eyes, but it turns out I just shot spittle out of my mouth.  He put the candy down and said, “you’re right, I’m sorry.”  It caught me so off guard.  I had all this anger all stockpiled by the entrance of my mouth and all of the sudden he’s just saying “I’m sorry.”  Like, that’s great, but what am I going to do with all this venom?  I looked around for someone else to yell at, but I didn’t see any republicans.  I felt like I had a mouth full of gristle at a fancy party and had to wait till no one was looking so I could spit it discretely into my cloth napkin.  I’m not good at changing gears this fast.  Last time we had a fight and I was wrong, I had to sit with my eyes closed and take sixteen deep breaths without saying anything before I could apologize.  It took sixteen deep breaths for me to rearrange my whole idea of myself into someone who could sometimes be wrong.  My pride was limping around giving me pitiful looks for days.

We did our taxes tonight and it was actually sort of fun.  Married life is weird.  We had stockpiled all these medical receipts and I read them out to Benjamin while he entered them into a spreadsheet on the computer.  It feels so nice and ordered to know that basket of scraps of paper is now a nice organized spreadsheet.  I’m not type A enough to do that sort of thing on my own, but I am type A enough to appreciate it when it is done.  My brain feels like it has good feng shui now. 

I went to the coffee shop today to work on my thesis and this nice young woman asked if she could sit down with me.  We talked for almost two hours.  I didn’t get much of my thesis done, but this is why I don’t work at home; it’s harder for the universe to tell you about something more important you should be doing.

The baby is either practicing her Olympic tumbling routine or I am about to have explosive diarrhea.  I really cannot tell which.  This is the weirdest thing my body has ever done.  Way weirder than the time I was twelve and realized I was growing little dark hairs in my armpits.  Puberty was rough; I feel like I just got used to that body and now here it goes changing on me again.  I have stretch marks on my breasts.  When I complained about this to Rosemary she arched one eyebrow so high it threatened to give up and join forces with her hair, “didn’t you have those already?”  I guess I am not going to get a lot of sympathy for the boob stretch mark thing. 

Yesterday was a terrible day.  Halfway through my third bout of sobbing I thought, “Oh yeah, depression, I remember you.”  Remembering that this was called depression did not really help me feel any better, but at least I had a name for it.  If I hadn’t remembered that it was called depression, I was going to christen it “Frederick.”  Today was much better.  Hopefully tomorrow will be bearable.  

Body Image, Pregnancy, and Obesity Stigma

I’m sixteen weeks pregnant and I have officially given up on all my non-maternity pants.  In a fit of nesting, I bought a bunch of clear plastic storage bins and stowed away all my too-tight pants under the bed.  The bin was nicely labeled, and I think that come October or so when I may fit into those pants again, I will remember where they are.  I would like a sticker, please.

Maternity pants are awesomely comfortable.  I had no idea pants could be this comfortable.  I especially like this one pair of jeans that have an elastic waistband rather than the huge elastic panel (though I know I am destined for panel-pants-land eventually).  The only problem with these pants is that I am constantly hiking them up.  Hence, long comfy maternity shirts.  Bingo!  As an added bonus, I got almost all my maternity clothes from a friend, who was clearly on the purge portion of the gather/nest/purge cycle.

I’m digging the new pants.  I am digging my “baby bump,” (though I agree with Lake Superior University that this phrase should be banned http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php). I’m enjoying constantly palpating my abdomen to locate the firm edge of my uterus.  (Do pregnant people who are not medical students do this? I don’t know.) 

Other than the debilitating heartburn, I am feeling pretty good about the whole situation.  Until I read an entry on one of my favorite blogs, The Underwear Drawer, whose author, doctor-mother-extraordinaire Michelle Au is sixteen weeks pregnant with her third child.  The blog post contained one of those ubiquitous belly-shots, which you can see here: http://theunderweardrawer.blogspot.com/2012/01/16-weeks.html.

Michelle is tiny, and in pregnancy seems to be remaining tiny.  Or maybe before she was pregnant she was actually translucent.  In any case, it made me feel like a giant pregnant whale.

Then my “What To Expect” week-by-week pregnancy guide tells me, “It’s hard to watch yourself gain weight during pregnancy, even when you know there’s a wonderful reason for it.”

Is it?  Should it be?  Why do I feel chastised by another woman’s belly shot? Why are we so concerned about gaining weight? 

We’re concerned about it because we have internalized the societal stigma against overweight people.  Studies on weight stigma have shown that people are more likely to judge the obese to be lazy, unintelligent, and incompetent.  

I suspect that the embarrassment of gaining weight during pregnancy comes from a desire not to be confused with “those people.”  You know, fat people.  Especially in early pregnancy, when you know people are debating whether you are “with child” or “with Chipotle.”  We want to represent ourselves accurately, “I’m not lazy and unintelligent, I’m just pregnant!”

Um, fat people aren’t actually those things either.  Fat people are no more likely to be lazy, unintelligent, or incompetent than thin people.  (See my master’s thesis on Obesity Stigma for full details, you know, as soon as I finish writing it.) 

Rather than carving out a social exception for ourselves (“I’m not fat, I’m pregnant,” we should be questioning why society judges fat people so harshly.  We should be questioning why it is socially acceptable to disparage people based on weight in ways that it is no longer to disparage groups of people based on race or sex.  (There are tons of examples of this, and I will get to them in a later post).

I am making it my goal during pregnancy and afterwards to eat well, exercise, and just not worry about what I weigh.  And I am also making it my goal to examine my attitudes towards others and challenging those attitudes when they are based on stereotypes and prejudice.

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