{"id":355,"date":"2015-08-27T18:18:22","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T18:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=355"},"modified":"2015-08-28T15:19:59","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T15:19:59","slug":"the-annual-conversation-i-hate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/?p=355","title":{"rendered":"The Annual Conversation I Hate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some of you (hi Mom!) may well consider this entire post TMI, but I don\u2019t care. I think we should talk about this stuff more, and just because the story starts with my having ladybits doesn\u2019t mean it should be swept under the rug.<\/p>\n

Once a year, those of us with ladybits are supposed to go to a doctor to have those bits examined. This can be more or less unpleasant depending on the exact kinds of examination that have to occur, and some of us would love to avoid it. But for some of us,\u00a0 the involvement of health insurance means we don\u2019t have a choice: if we want the birth control, we have to have a lunch date with the speculum (go ahead and look that up, male-people; I\u2019ll wait).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Several years ago I decided to pick a nice ladydoctor practice, preferably one with actual lady-doctors, and try to have a long-term relationship with them, instead of my prior fly-by-night relationships with anybody who would write me a prescription for 12 months of The Pill. So I found a well-reputed place here in Atlanta. I freaked out a little at my first visit because Well-Reputed Ladydoctor means babies \u2014 lots and lots of babies, pregnant women, women who want to be pregnant, posters of babies and pregnant women, brochures about what to do with your placenta after birth, etc. It\u2019s a little intimidating, especially if the Should I Have Babies OMG Am I Missing Out thing is an issue in your life. But I tried to cultivate both self-love and other-love and see the women there as just other women, doing their thing, even if the thing they\u2019re doing is different from what I\u2019m doing, which is also okay.<\/p>\n

The doctor I saw that year was very nice. When, at the end of the exam, she asked me if I\u2019d given any thought to having children, and then gently suggested that I was getting older and needed to go ahead and do it already if I was going to do it, I was a little flustered, but I let it go. I know doctors need to ask these questions, because some patients won\u2019t bring stuff up on their own. I have enough wonderful doctor friends to really, really get that.<\/p>\n

But it got weird the next year, when the same doctor asked me the same question, and gave me the same lecture, verbatim<\/em>. I remembered it with searing clarity, so I am 100% sure she was working off a script. I understand why that might be, and so I deflected the conversation with noncommittal answers, and we moved on.<\/p>\n

Year three? I almost said something. I thought about reciting the lecture along with her. I wondered when I get to the next level of the script, the \u201cWell, you\u2019re really too old now, TOO BAD, LOSER\u201d level. I made a lot of jokes in my head. And then, when I got to my car, I started crying, and I cried all the way home, and I wasn\u2019t even sure exactly why I was crying.<\/p>\n

So this year I decided to be a little proactive, and although I went to the same practice, I asked for a different doctor. And I rehearsed the conversation. When she asked if I\u2019d given any thought to having children (seriously? Are there 37-year-old women in the USA who haven\u2019t<\/em>? I cannot be the only one who has noticed that most women have kids by my age, right?), I was prepared. Thanks, I said, but we had<\/em> given thought to it, and for now we\u2019d decided it wasn\u2019t going to happen. And it might happen later on, but if it did, I understood that it probably wasn\u2019t going to happen with my own ladybits, or at least not without some assistance, and we were aware of other options and would be just fine.<\/p>\n

I guess I hoped, on some level, that there\u2019s a box on the forms the doctors have, and that she could check \u201cWell-informed; does not need to have this particular stick shoved in her eye every 12 months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead? This doctor \u2014 who was also very nice! and doing her job! and I get that! \u2014 set her clipboard down and removed her glasses and looked at me thoughtfully.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean adoption?\u201d she asked. \u201cI have several friends who have gone that route. It\u2019s a wonderful option and I fully support it in theory. But if you\u2019re going to do that, honestly? you should think about starting that process soon too. It can take years<\/em>, and it\u2019s really stressful and exhausting, and if you don\u2019t start pretty soon, you\u2019ll find yourself\u2026 well, you might even have more difficulty adopting, and either way, you could end up being older than you\u2019d wish you had been.\u201d<\/p>\n

I will tell you that instead of crying on the way home yesterday I just tried to honor the feelings of SHEER RAGE. I can\u2019t even articulate all of it. Maybe I\u2019ll try over several days, but for right now, I thought maybe I\u2019d see if anybody else has had similar experiences, and thoughts about it.<\/p>\n

I want my doctors to be proactively involved in my health care. I don\u2019t want them to tiptoe around me. But there has to be a way to say to grown women \u2014 especially grown women who have come to your office specifically<\/em> asking for birth control prescriptions \u2014 that you are open to being a resource for them, without implying that they idiotically haven\u2019t thought through their decisions, and that somehow this is a decision they really need to think through above all others.<\/p>\n

I know motherhood is special and awesome. It\u2019s something I might enjoy someday \u2014 but maybe not. Sort of like skydiving. If I do it, I\u2019ll do it on my own schedule. In the meantime, there has<\/em> to be some way for me to opt out of this conversation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you (hi Mom!) may well consider this entire post TMI, but I don\u2019t care. I think we should talk about this stuff more, and just because the story starts with my having ladybits doesn\u2019t mean it should be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"I probably need a better headline for this. But this is about my conversation yesterday with my doctor, and how it made me a little stabby. Ladies of a certain age may sympathize.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ruminations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/wpid-20130616_172141_wm.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6y0gZ-5J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtsredacted.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}