This is a topic I've grown extremely passionate about through my pregnancy journeys'. We, as women, spend a lot of time worrying about everyone else, but often don't pay enough attention to ourselves. When we are pregnant our bodies are flooded with hormones and our intuition is on high alert, so when we question things and receive a response from our doctor like "that's very normal" our first response is to quiet our internal voice. In my experience, it's absolutely terrifying to be the sole provider of answers to questions during pregnancy, specifically a first pregnancy. We've never done this before and our default is set to 'this must be normal'. We are not experts and I think we tend to steer away from additional inquiry because this journey is SO foreign to us, and we (for some reason) don't want to 'bug', 'interrupt' or 'annoy' our healthcare providers. During our twin pregnancy I visited labor and delivery in advance of my girls' births over 10 times due to what I perceived as pre-term labor signs. Each time they stopped labor or took additional precautions, to keep those babies in. I continued to have a tremendous amount of guilt around this, like I was some sort of legendary, 'oh here she is again' pregnant patient. Hindsight is always 20/20, but at least for me, I wasn't sure I had done the right thing by wobbling in to the labor and delivery unit at all hours, repeatedly, until after I was validated. It wasn't until after the girls were born at 36 weeks that I heard my doctor say, 'great job listening to your body'. I'm pretty sure my response was 'really??' I know now that he had said it numerous times but I didn't hear it because I was so stinking concerned about the impression I was making on the nurses and others. I'm not proposing that every mom become irrationally demanding, but what I am proposing is that we recognize that we are the only people that can advocate for our unborn children during pregnancy - here's 10 tips on when and why to speak up:
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