When I was pregnant with my eldest son, though it was not my first pregnancy, I was (naturally) startled and mystified by my body. Growing a human being in your torso for the first time involves a huge learning curve, albeit a rather involuntary one. In the face of not knowing what is really going on, and the highest stakes ever encountered by most first-time mothers (the health of my child, whoa), anxiety levels can rise. For those of us who struggle with anxiety even on calm waters, the drop down into its spiral can be abrupt.
These feelings (I don’t know what’s going on – I’m starting to feel fluttery – so having a hard time focusing – and if I miss something right now that’ll be very, very bad because it feels very, very important to catch all of this) often attend learning of any kind. Much has been written about how these things play out in educational settings. Perhaps less has been said about how they operate in medical environments, where the learning being done is about one’s own health, and where the lessons can literally be a matter of life and death (algebra, impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, can’t actually kill).
Anyhow, I had always hated medical settings, hated lying back on those tables. It was simply a matter of the vulnerability of bright lights + complete stranger + exposed body parts. I knew the only choice for me was a home birth; in Ontario, though, even if planning a home birth with a midwife, it is still standard practice to have regular ultrasounds in hospitals or clinics. So there I was, lying back.
The language barrier between the ultrasound technician and me would have been easy to negotiate if the emotional and energetic stuff between us hadn’t sent me into full vertigo. She treated me as though I were a naughty child, stupid girl, stupid pregnant cow (oh, yes, the tones were every bit as violent as that). She had been officious with the freezing cold gel, and roughly indifferent to how I was about to urinate (remember that about ultrasounds, now, you haven’t peed since last night); she didn’t speak to me, really, until she made these… sounds. Sounds that sounded really quite gravely concerned about what she was seeing on her screen.
I’m not going to panic, rather just ask her, what is it? Flutter. She snaps back that ultrasound technicians are not permitted by law to disclose any information at all to patients. Then she keeps making the sounds, apparently unaware of how much “information” is thereby being conveyed. So I ask again. And am shot down again. And start to cry, which has always been my go-to response to anxiety. She proceeds to scold me for doing so, seeming to imply (I forget exactly what words she used to accomplish this but am certain she did) that as a mother, I’m going to have to toughen up and am no longer a little girl and just don’t cry. Stop crying, in the tone of an abusive parent threatening to give you something to cry about if you don’t.
In panic, you can’t think straight. Fight, flight, freeze: dead baby, dead baby, I’m dying, let me go, I can’t go, I’m trapped, I’m falling in, please, I’m going to pee, no. And not being able to think straight – not being able to perform any of the cognitive operations required for learning, such as remembering sequence and drawing connections among parts – is at the heart of the issue. It goes far deeper than a discussion about “bedside manner”, nor would trainings on bedside manner address the problem. The issue has to do with health care providers of all kinds being attuned to the impacts that difficult experiences past and present have on our physiologies, attuned in very sincere and sophisticated ways.
What I needed in the moment described here was, on the other hand, simple. I needed a human being to co-create the exchange with me, one who could hold that much power over me tenderly and respectfully. I needed someone to be present to see and hear me, to receive my response that we both knew was irrational, in order to… open.
Imagine too how much more searing all of this would have been if my baby had not, in fact, been just fine. Imagine how much more rending all of this would be if I had not been experiencing plain old anxiety, but rather if I had been actually triggered due to past trauma in clinical settings. Or outside them: powerlessness, for people who have been sexually or physically brutalized, is very delicate business. I myself have only experienced garden variety violations; violence has touched my life of course, but nothing catastrophic, nothing beyond average (though that’s sad enough to say of course) for any adult woman in the world. There are tonnes of people interacting with health care professionals right now who can’t say that. Who are spacing out, who are spinning out.
Heather Lash
