The pre-baby making - not for the fainthearted

I’m not a big fan of needles. Or witnessing any kind of blood letting. My pre-teen and adolescent years has seen me through a couple occasions where I’ve fainted along the school corridor after a rubella vaccination, and at a public bus stop after witnessing a gruesome accident.

Call me a wuss if you like, or a weakling. Either way, I hate needles.

So when I told my GP that Lee and I wanted to start TTC, imagine my horror as she printed out a checklist of pre-pregnancy blood tests and vaccination sheet for me. Within the next three months, I was scheduled for the routine blood tests and screenings of a myriad of possible deficiencies and diseases; and I knew that the chicken pox vaccination inevitable as I was never fortunate enough to catch it as a child.

As my veins became a regular needle expressway, I wondered about the women who fell pregnant without needing to go through any of this and still had gorgeous healthy babies. How much ignorance was bliss?

Does planning a pregnancy take the joy out of becoming pregnant? Or even the excitement of sex to conceive?

When I told my girlfriends that we were planning on getting pregnant, the one with a baby responded candidly with advice on baby-making positions and the effort she had to put into TTC; while the singleton was aghast at the work required to make a baby.

I mused at the innocence and spontaneity of the singleton’s baby making ideas, and wondered how we managed to arrived at an age in society where knowing too much meant going through physical and emotional torture of something meant to be natural.

It’s not to say that science hasn’t done wonderful things for women who have difficulty conceiving. I was more concerned about how much worries and stress we’ve gifted ourselves because of the knowledge of “what if something went wrong?”

It took a bit of consciousness for me to, ironically, stop being conscious of those needles. Even though I’d still jump and cringe at every pinch of that cold metal against my skin, I knew that every stab was well-meaning for me and the bub who would be expected to soon arrive.

I just didn’t expect that at 31, heading home one evening after the final round of vaccinations, I’d faint on a public bus on George St and disrupt rush hour traffic.

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