My Street Cred for Talking About Human Reproduction

I recently tripped across this clip saying "street cred" is garbage White people say. I spent years homeless, so that's another reason for me to find it funny.

I don't know what to call this piece. My background, my credentials, raisin d'etre... nothing seems to fit what I'm trying to say here.

But THIS is why I write about such things and perhaps you will think I'm not just wasting your time after you read it.

My mother wanted to be a doctor and ended up an illegal immigrant to West Germany and then was a homemaker and full-time mom for a lot of years. She actually delivered babies in her teens.

She never stopped reading medical articles and her unusual depth of knowledge helped keep me alive and surprisingly well without a diagnosis for my genetic disorder.

My sister worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and she had extremely serious fertility issues. She required medical intervention to try to get pregnant and she pursued that with both marriages before finally getting pregnant and that's considered a hard case because often just changing partners will resolve it.

Because of her long history of trying to get pregnant and failing and her age at the time, her physician skipped slowly ramping up dosage and just jacked my sister up in maximum amounts of fertility drugs which resulted in both a baby and an ovarian cyst the size of a softball.

She spent her one successful gestation resulting in live birth on bed rest rather than agree to surgery to remove the cyst which likely would have lost her the baby.

She's my sister and because of who our mother was, we talked about the medical details and we both know the medical history of various relatives.

She began having contractions a few weeks too early and they tried to stop the labor and she ended up delivering about three weeks early because the placenta was coming apart and there was nothing more they could do.

So she is on her way to the hospital to have an emergency delivery and phones me and I tell her "If they offer you pain killers, TAKE THEM when it's offered. You don't have the strength to do this without them."

Our mom delivered a baby without any pain killers and was told "Shut up. It's too late. This baby is coming." I declined pain killers when offered them with my first baby and by the time the pain was bad enough that I wanted them, I was told it's too late.

They don't give birthing moms pain killers past a certain stage. My family has a high pain threshold and none of us likes taking pain killers.

That advice helped her give birth vaginally under extremely difficult circumstances with a pregnancy that has been expected to result in a C-section delivery.

The huge ovarian cyst has shrunk and moved. She had this baby vaginally during the only 24 hour window where that was remotely possible.

She had multiple successful conceptions after that. They all miscarried.

She had a serious infection following the birth. It's a somewhat common complication of birth but usually isn't serious. She has substantial scar tissue in her uterus and she had dreams that we discussed and we believe the scar tissue prevented the placenta from successfully attaching securely and when the fetus hit a certain size, it just tore away every time she conceived.

Prior to finally having a baby, she routinely mailed me articles that likely were scholarly pieces not available to the general public. She likely had access via her job at the CDC and I would read them and we would discuss them.

She was trying to solve HER extremely difficult fertility problems and I think she was extremely picky about what information she accepted as credible. When she later had cancer and was working at the CDC, she would call me and go "Well this year's TRENDY medical thing is blah and there are ninety nine studies on that because you can easily get funding and there are TWO studies on anything of interest to ME!" 

My father was married to three different women and didn't have children by either of the first two. I have a homozygous recessive genetic disorder that significantly impacts fertility, so my parents both had to be carriers for me to have this condition.

My "man whore" brother failed to father a dozen kids on a dozen women. Doctors have expressed SHOCK that I had two children without fertility intervention and I'm apparently fertile Myrtle of the three kids.

To my discomfort, I had to call my sister and tell her I'm pregnant AGAIN long before she successfully conceived at all. At one time, she and I were talking about the possibility of me serving as surrogate mom for her.

My first child wasn't planned. He was the result my flaky birth control failing. Me second child was planned but I was surrounded by people saying "We tried for eight months (or two years!) for our second one!" and I skipped a barrier method of birth control like two or three times and felt like we would have been better prepared financially had it taken another six months.

My first born child has the same genetic disorder. Neither of us was diagnosed until around the time he turned fourteen.

I had a very hard first pregnancy where I threw up for months and was hospitalized for dehydration and weight loss when I first found out I was pregnant after going to the ER because I just couldn't keep food down.

Memory is state dependent and birthing him was so terrible I spent years only able to remember the birth when I was in agony for some reason.

I woke up with labor around noon and barely ate and went to the hospital and some nurse told me to walk the halls and "You don't know what pain is." without doing a vaginal exam. They came and got me off the floor with a wheelchair because a total stranger complained to staff and asked "Are you going to get this lady off the floor??" Because I sank to the floor with every contraction.

I was already nearly fully dilated. My water didn't break with either delivery. In both cases, they had to break my water and in the second case, my labor had stalled and breaking my water restarted it and then he showed up post haste.

So with both deliveries, they RAN me down the hall for different reasons. 

I think with the first, my career infantry husband was given instructions on how to help me breathe and push and no one said anything about when to call anyone so I had like crowned the head when someone checked on me and went "You (FOOLS) should have called me!"

With my second one, I had a stage of labor where you have the uncontrollable urge to push that I never experienced with the first one and he was born something like 13 minutes later. They wheeled me into delivery and the doctor was still getting his gown on and expected me to somehow MAGICALLY stop pushing so he could do an episiotomy because my second child was Andre the Giant's little cousin.

And magically I did because I could feel this was a big baby and he gave me my first six stretch marks on my stomach. I had NONE from my first pregnancy.

Now I look like Jaba the Hut and have ten million. But at the time I was in my twenties and had taken gymnastics and hospital staff had no sympathy and no advice for how to not lose my ability to do the Chinese splits during my pregnancy.

So it hurt my VANITY, thus I remember this.

This isn't REALLY comprehensive. Suffice it to say fertility issues run in the family and are known to be associated with and caused by my genetic disorder and some of my relatives were unusually knowledgeable and I've also had friends in medicine over the years.

Last I checked, most Americans are averaging 1.5 kids, so most women in America are apparently having only one or two kids. In contrast, I was one of three kids, my aunt down the street had four, my mom was one of twelve kids (no one ever says thirteen though she also had a half sibling she never met because her father remarried after her mother died) and my dad was one of five kids.

We have lost a wealth of "common knowledge" rooted in firsthand experience and I was able to make a big difference in my sister's ability to successfully deliver vaginally by just telling her "You're like me and mom. By the time the pain is too much for you, they won't give you painkillers. Take them WHEN they offer them. After months of bed rest, you don't have the strength for this without them."

In most cases, vaginal delivery is generally better for both mom and baby. The number of C-section deliveries has skyrocketed and we've lost tremendous amounts of important cultural wisdom.

I also helped my sister successfully breastfeed when the doctors and nurses were failing her there too.

So I have reason to believe that I have useful knowledge that is in somewhat short supply and I KNOW my commitment to "natural" health and avoiding unnecessary medical procedures like invasive surgeries is rare and rather extreme without being some fruitcake like antivaxxers are perceived as.

By which I mean my position isn't rooted in some strange ideology, so I'm not taking irrational positions about "Breastfeeding is the ONLY good answer!" No, it's not if your kid is lactose intolerant and starts throwing up Mom's milk, as one of my kids did.

I'm not against having access to C-section deliveries which can be life saving. But this has gotten out of hand and is doing a lot of harm to women and children and I believe putting out useful information is the best way to remedy it a la "light one candle rather than curse the dark."

And it's not just C-sections. That's just one symptom of a reproductive landscape that has changed markedly in a few short decades.