I am now 24 weeks into my pregnancy, making today the earliest day I could deliver the lentil and still have even a vague hope of him living. While I don't intend on giving birth until late in May, I am still comforted knowing that he has made it safely through the first bit. He's kicking right now in joy. I see too much in healthcare and know too much about what can go wrong. This keeps me up at night. Now the lentil can keep me up at night on his own since i have fewer worries today than I did yesterday.

Woo! passed the boards!

Being pregnant really reminds me that I'm an animal first. All this illusion of control and power over my environment is just silly. My body is in control. My hormones are in control. There is nothing I can possibly do to change the course of this pregnancy, other than starve myself or do some ridiculous self destructive behavior. Excepting the obvious ways I could cause harm to the lentil, my body belongs to nature and not to me. I can't control the changes happening and the more extreme the changes become the less I even feel like I need control. At this point, I would just bargain for a day without feeling icky. And a really really good night's sleep.

I saw a patient yesterday who was so absolutely delightful. A woman in her late 70's, who is now on her second recurrence of ovarian cancer. We talked about her health and the things that were bothering her physically, then talked about her life a little. I love this job I have, because I can spend basically unlimited time with patients just gabbing about whatever they want. One of her concerns is that she regain enough strength to survive chemo and then move into a home where she can have cats. Part of her strategy to regain strength is to do more housework. (yeah, whatever floats your boat, my friend...) One of her "chores" for the past two weeks was to put her photos into photo albums. We spent about half an hour looking through her photo albums, with her narrating. I saw her old home, her deceased husband, her granddaughter and her children. It is always fascinating to see photos of patients from before they had cancer, from when they were younger and more vital. We went through three albums in that half an hour. She showed me photos of her husband on the rider mower attending to their enormous front yard. There were photos of her husband visiting friends in Switzerland. As she grew more comfortable with me she added little bits of narration: "That was my husband six weeks before he died." "That was my husband two days before he died."

When patients talk like that about their loved ones it makes me so deeply sad. Her husband dropped dead of a heart attack at 70, totally unexpectedly. She then had to sell her gorgeous house with the big front yard and give away her pets and move into a teeny condo in a lousy building. Her life was completely changed by that event. She has coped well under the circumstances, and I wonder if I would be so strong. If I was taking photos of sweets doing yardwork one day and burying him a week later . . . I guess I just have to work to fill our lives with very good times, because there will inevitably be very sad times too.

I got home from that patient visit and gave my sweets an extra hug. I gave the cat an extra belly rub. I called my mom and my dad and my brother. I couldn't help myself.