I took Faustina for her one-month checkup today. Where she also got the second installment of the hep-B vaccine.
I love her doctor: a young woman, perhaps a couple years younger than me (women her age always remind me of my sister and so I suspect I have a particular fondness for them), an immigrant (like me) if Indian descent (not like me) married to an American (like me, sort of). See how much I focus on things that are “like” for me? I like those. But more importantly: she takes as much time as I need, for questions, reassurance, even to chat, because that is how you make a new mom comfortable.
She was sick at Faustina’s first doctor’s appointment, the one two days after we brought her home from the hospital, and we got an older doctor from the practice. A sixty-something man, very kind, very old-school. I liked him well enough too, except that of the fifteen minutes he spent with us he took five to discuss Faustina and her health issues and ten to talk about where to go fishing in New Jersey with A. He even wrote down some the URLs of some fishing web sites he liked, on a piece of paper that (in hindsight) must have contained the vitamin information that our real doctor gave us again today.
Sure, he also noted that Faustina is beautiful, and completely normal, and has good suction (seriously: she does have good suction) and was clearly not going to worry himself over a baby who is completely fine. So it’s not that I was mad at him. And in a different time and different place, I’d have been very happy with him as our pediatrician. But I don’t live in that time or place and prefer our real pediatrician, who is chatty and young and talks to me about babies and children and is like a girlfriend. I’ve discovered I prefer girlfriend-ish doctors in general.
At today’s visit, Faustina got weighed and measured. She’s smack in the middle of all charts, in terms of both her size and her growth curve: she’s that elusive Completely Average-Sized Baby. Then the minute the weighing was done, when I picked her up off the scale and held her small naked body close so she wouldn’t get cold, she sprung a leak and peed all over me. Fun, isn’t it? Lucky that a month-old baby’s pee is just a clear, odorless liquid that dries within minutes. Because as soon as that was dry, my right boob decided it was time for Faustina to eat and joined her in leakage.
After that, the only thing that remained were being told she’s fine (again), being given the infant vitamin information (again), and Faustina getting a hep-B shot (again). That last part did not go as quickly as last time because right after she got it she began wailing like she’d just experienced the greatest, most unfair betrayal of her young life. Which I suppose is just about right. Except that afterwards it all got better because my right boob won and Faustina got fed in an empty examination room. I’m finding I’m becoming more selfish and demanding as a mother because I totally made the nurse who gave her her shot carry all our stuff over to the empty exam room for us. Because I had to focus on holding only my sweet little baby and nothing else.
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