"Good morning, madam. How are you today?" I smiled at the
beautiful lady as she walked into the consulting room.
"I am fine, thanks," She
smiled back at me and sat down, "and you?"
"Very well, thanks. How may I help
you?"
"I am pregnant, so I came to register for antenatal care," she explained happily.
"It's my first pregnancy and trust me, I'm very excited."
"Congratulations!"
That I was happy for her wasn't in question. Anyone that knows what young women
with fertility problems go through in the society will be happy for her.
"Thanks. My husband is so excited, too. He's a very rich and generous man. Rest
assured that he'll reward you handsomely if you take good care of me and at the
end of my pregnancy, his baby boy is delivered to him in good health," she said
to me with a bold smile and my heart leapt for joy. This is the kind of patient
I like taking care of, I said to myself. "Oh, I see that you have already done an ultrasound scan."
"Not yet," she answered, "I hope to get it done today."
I
dropped my pen and focused my gaze on her. "So, how did you know that your baby
is a boy?"
"Because my pastor said so," she answered proudly.
"Your pastor...
told you... that your baby is... a boy?" I asked with disbelief.
And she nodded.
"I see," I said, scratched my head and decided to let that slide. Besides it was time to get down
to business. I needed to take her history and examine her as quickly as
possible. I had already spent so much time with her and soon other patients on
the queue would start complaining. "So madam, when did you see your period
last?" I asked as I retrieved my pen from the desk.
"I am on it," she said casually.
"You are?" I asked not believing her and she nodded. Things were getting
complicated so I decided to straighten them out. "Madam, it's not possible to be
menstruating while pregnant. Once you become pregnant, you stop menstruating
till after your baby is born. If you are bleeding right now, then you're having
threatened abortion or retained product of conception," I explained with regret.
"But I never missed my periods. They always came at the expected time," she said
and my jaw dropped. At this point, I needed to ask the basic question. "Did you do a pregnancy test?" I asked her.
"Nope," she sounded jovial.
"So how did you conclude that you are pregnant?" I asked with
frustration.
"My pastor said so," she emphasized the words and I got so angry that I felt like
punching her in the face. In this age and time? Gosh! "Well, madam...," I
started after a brief silence, "I'm not saying that your pastor is wrong but
this is a hospital. We practice medicine not miracle. I would have requested a pregnancy test but your tommy is already big enough, we should get an ultrasound scan
instead. We need to be sure that what is growing inside of you is truly a baby.
It could be fibroid," I didn't voice out the last sentence. I would have been
tagged a devil instantly. So I kept that thought to myself. She agreed to go for
the scan and when the report came out, the impression was that she had multiple
uterine fibroid. When I read the report to her, she shook her head and told me
that it was a fine boy not a fibroid and promised to invite me for the baby's
church dedication. I smiled and advised her for a myomectomy so that she could get
pregnant and have her fine boy but she angrily walked out on me. She came back after more than a year
not to show me her 'fine boy' but to agree to the myomectomy and the picture
above is what we harvested.
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