Today I visited the OB. Doesn’t that sound nice? Sort of like we sat and drank tea and ate cookies and had a nice long chat. And it really was remarkably like that, except you have to forget about the tea. Also the cookies. Oh, and replace the chat part with a giant cotton swab.

Okay, so it wasn’t the same at all.

But then again, why isn’t it? When you go to the OB/GYN, don’t you think it would be nice if they offered you some hot, fresh cookies in the end? What would be so hard about that? Here’s an even better idea: make Dr. OB/GYN eat some hot, fresh cookies before coming into the room. I feel certain this would put them all in jolly, conversant, and amiable frames of mind, not to mention giving them warm hands.

My OB is a Nice Guy. He’s even a Nice Christian Guy. But he is still, at the core, an OB. To me, this means he’s a git-r-dun kinda guy who has a lot of patients and not a lot of time. I have wasted a lot of witty comments on the man, which aggravates me. What is the point of a witty comment if all you get is an absent minded head-nod? I’m pretty sure he HAS a sense of humor, he just sticks it in his back pocket when he’s at work.

I have to really say something startling for him to slow down and actually look at me. Last pregnancy, at 39 weeks pregnant, I said “I think there’s a head here” and motioned to my ribcage. I had made the mistake of sitting in a massage chair a few days before that, and I’m pretty sure the kid had scrambled to get away from the strange sensations in the area his head normally rested.

Suddenly Dr. OB was terribly interested in what I had to say.I was right, by the way. So then we had a version to turn the kid and an induction to keep him from bobbing back up again like a cork once he was the right way ’round. But I have to wonder, what if I hadn’t said anything? Would he have ever known? I would have gone into labor and had the kid breech before he had a clue, I’m pretty certain. This is because he hardly touched me throughout the pregnancy.

For a woman accustomed to being kneaded like bread dough by a midwife at every visit in the third trimester, this was strange to me. My midwife could tell you the exact placement of every extremity of the child at any given moment, never mind head up/head down. Posterior? Anterior? Fully engaged? She might as well have had tiny x-rays lodged in the tips of her fingers.

I decided that, this time around, I would keep my mouth shut. If I suspected the child was breech, I was going to let him figure it out, if he could. I thought the version/induction was pretty debatable as far as its necessity went, but he was obviously uncomfortable with delivering breech, although he claimed he had done it before. He was far more comfortable just slicing me open, which I was decidedly UNcomfortable with.

At any rate, this go-round he has been extra careful to check position. And thus far, baby seems to be amenable to the head-down option. But I’m cutting a wide swath around massage chairs at this point.

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