A Pound of Prevention?

Against all predictions, I am now two full weeks past the day my Sugar Bean was supposed to be enormous enough to punch her way through my abdominal wall like something out of the "buried alive" scene in Kill Bill Vol. II. I'm also a week past the day my OB started trying to talk me into inducing labor using the same what-if scenarios I heard towards the end of my last pregnancy...

As you know if you've been reading here for a while, I'm all for being prepared. You'll almost never find me without clean sheets for our twin-sized sofas since we've been known to host eleventh-hour visitors, and it's an equally rare occasion to find my pantry bereft of something I can throw together for surprise dinner guests. There's certainly merit in being ready to meet unexpected challenges.

That said, I don't have an epinephrine syringe in the house, so if we discover the hard way that one of us is deathly allergic to [peanut butter] [bees] [shellfish] [overuse of brackets], we may be out of luck until the paramedics arrive. And if I should whack my head and lose consciousness -- God forbid, but it's an even greater possibility than the allergy scenario -- then my not-quite-three-year-old son would be left to entertain / fend for himself until someone else got home. He can't get to anything poisonous, but heaven help the cat...

Fact is, you can't possibly be prepared for all the things that probably will go wrong at some point in your life, much less for all the other things that could... and attempting to do so can often make things worse, not better. Ask the people who blew their savings on remote acreage, MREs and firearms they didn't end up needing for Y2K... or the families of the folks who suffocated in their airtight rooms after following U.S. government-issued instructions to protect them from the possibility of chemical warfare.

I'm sure by now the point I'm trying to make is as obvious as my protruding belly: interventions in childbirth -- which simply aren't as necessary as they're often made out to be here in the U.S. --  are almost always offered under the guise of preventing undesirable outcomes... but for the love of Benjamin Franklin, since when is having your gut slashed open and stapled shut a "desirable outcome"?

In case you haven't heard me say it at least a dozen times before, yes, I will absolutely take another cesarean if a legitimate need arises. Until that moment comes, though, I intend to continue taking my prevention by the ounce...

Comments

[Joseph]

Thank you for the awesome comment on my "pause" post. What a cool expression of God's desire for us to rest...especially for the ladies who do all the birthing work!

[Ami]

I do have a great desire to try to be prepared all the time but I have only been learning that I can't prepare for everything and God is a MUCH better parent to my children than I am :) What a relief!