Melissa's Place

Brainpower

Babies require an inordinate amount of brainpower. Well, not exactly babies. Being pregnant seems to require an indordinate amount of brainpower.

I first realized this last year when I wasn't even pregnant yet and I attended a pregnancy workshop. The friendly Union rep spent two hours explaining how to go on maternity leave and still get your benefits and whether we should pay into our pension plan and which forms to complete and how to apply for a top up for the first six weeks and how you know when you can go on leave and how you know when you should go back to work and what if you want to be off for longer than a year......And I didn't understand one single thing. I am not used to not understanding. I have always been on the honour role in school. I used to consider myself fairly clever. Apparently not. I wrote everything the lady said down, desperately hoping that when I needed the information either it would suddenly be a lot clearer or someone more knowledgeable and intelligent could translate it for me.

And the most recent reminder that pregnancy is far more complicated than I anticipated came at my first visit with my obstetrician. There were requisitions for ultrasounds and a blood sugar test and bloodwork. I had to make appointments for every month between such and such a date and then every two weeks between such and such a date and then every single week after a particular date. There was a manual to read (which, by the way, is too frightening for night-time reading) and there were hospital registration forms to complete and questionnaires regarding food preferences (which really weren't all that hard to fill out - I was just feeling overwhelmed at the time). I have so many appointments between my family doctor, my thyroid doctor, my obstetrician and my prenatal massage therapist, that I'm not sure how other women do the pregnant thing and also succeed at holding down a permanent job! And to make matters worse, my dayplanner, I just realized, ended mid-July.

Well, I've had to spread out all my requisitions in organized piles on the spare futon in my office. I've got colour-coded sticky tabs and I've photocopied the really important documents. I have a list of all the medical labs that will do bloodwork for my area and I've mapquested the nearest ones. All my requisitions are grouped with paperclips and stuck in a special compartment in my purse. I had to immediately go out and purchase a dayplanner which had ALL of July and at least 12 months thereafter. And I've even backed up the appointment data in a Microsoft Outlook dayplanning program.

I'm not sure what less organized women do.
I guess their uterus just does all of the work.