Originally when I was a child growing up, I used to say I was gonna have
six Children and each of them were gonna look like one of my friends.
But a as I grew up and had kids, I didn't think I only have six Children.
Yeah, two was a good number. It was in the year of 1967.
This was my third pregnancy. I wouldn't call it exactly planned. But it
was not a huge surprise and it was, it was like we wanted to have another
child, but we weren't really specifically trying that hard. At that moment
in time I had had toxemia in an earlier pregnancy. Toxemia is when your
kidneys start to fail and your blood pressure shoots way up. That had
happened in my first pregnancy and it wasn't realized and my first child
had died. So I was so afraid of having to see me again. I had had like a
grand mal convulsion and everything else. I mean, I could have literally
died. I was very careful about things like that. And both for my second
pregnancy and the third one, I had rented a blood pressure instrument and
I took my own blood pressure every day. A few weeks before the birth, we
had had a big snowstorm, which was scary to me because my doctor had told
me that it was gonna be a rapid delivery. The baby was situated in such a
way that the cord could wrap around her neck. I got tearful and I said,
well, what can I do? And he said, well, what do you want me to do? Put you
in the hospital early? And I said, yes, my health was fine. You know, I, I
was just worried it was gonna happen again, you know, and a few days
before Valentine's day, I went into labor in the hospital, I started with
having these labor pains in my back. I wasn't sure I was in labor. There
was a nursing shortage at that point in the hospital and I called the
nurse and she said, I'll be in there when I can I have to empty all the
trash cans on the floor first. So there I was, and finally like 20 minutes
later or something, she showed up and when she looked at me, she could
tell that the baby was about ready to be born. And so she screamed and ran
out of the room and called my doctor and he got there just right about as
she was being born and he didn't even have time to put on a white coat or
anything like that. She was basically born with almost no sedation or
anything like that and born very quickly. And then they had people in the
hospital a lot longer than they do now. You know? And I was probably in
there a good three or four days before I went home. It's what in those
states they called rooming in where you have your baby in the room with
you. So, and I had done that in my previous pregnancy too. I, one thing I
learned from that first experience, I had my father was a physician and I
had always gone to good doctors. I had gone to a general practitioner who
was the family doctor for my husband's family. And um my mother kept
saying, you know, why don't you go to an OBGYN? But I wanted to do kind of
what was expected in that situation. But after that child died of a crib
death, I then went to see an OBGYN and had him review my records and
everything. And I wanted to know whether I should have another child or
not because I didn't understand everything that had happened. And he said
, you know, this may not ever happen to you again. And he also was very
critical of the doctor. I had been to, he said, you know, he must have
been throwing your urine samples down the drain or something. He said
probably be fine as long as you go to somebody who knows what they're
doing. But he said, whatever you do don't go back to Joe Schmo. I just
kind of trusted my doctor and I really came to believe something that I
read in a book later on. But I believed it already, which is that you
really have to be a partner with your doctor and you can't just say
whatever you think. Like I had to take my own blood pressure and things
like that, which was probably excessive, but that's how I felt. You know,
that I, I wanted to take charge this time, make sure that things went, you
know, the way they should go. I just really believe that you have to rely
on your doctor up to a point, but you have to be in charge. It's your baby
and your delivery and, yeah.