Dr. Gian-what's-his-face

Called my mom this morning. They've got 20 inches of snow and F (her husband) was setting off, in snowshoes, to get the snow blower I can only assume from a neighbor. Out here on the west coast it's gorgeous. Warm, birds chirping in the garden, weather atypical for February..what a contrast.

So I called her to ask her about her symptoms in early pregnancy. I was feeling anxious because of my cramps that have been coming and going like the tide, stressed because I have no clear indication either way of what my body is doing.

So in reply to my, "What sort of signs of pregnancy did you have?", she paused and said, "I didn't have any". "At all?" I asked. "No, nothing until the last trimester when I had some nausea while in San Diego, but it was really short and then it was gone." Whoa. I drilled her.

"Did you have cramps?" (No.)

"Did you have any breast tenderness?" (No).

"Did you feel anything at all that made you think you were pregnant?" (No).

"So what made you think, finally, that you were pregnant?"

To this her answer was something like,

"Well my period didn't come for a couple of months so I went to get an examination. You know, in those days they didn't have pregnancy tests like they do now."

A COUPLE of months? I would be flippin' out if my period was four days late. She did admit that she was really naive about this at her young age, so it was just par for the course.

"Really?" I remarked. "What did they do back then?"

"You would have to have an examination."

"Interesting."

She mentioned then that she remembered the doctor's name. Gianfarco, Gianfranco, or something like that. (I'm willing to bet it was the latter). He wasn't an OB/GYN, but a regular MD. He had an office over on Farmington Road, which was close to her work (which I'll assume was in Hartford). She had chosen to go to him, not because she had ever seen him before, but because his office was close to her work and it would be convenient. Fit it all in during the lunch hour or something like that.

So Dr. Gian-what's-his-name examined her manually and declared that she was indeed pregnant. And before she left to go back to work, get this: He asked her out for a drink.

What a letch.

Was he thinking, "Hey, here we have this young, attractive, unmarried woman who is obviously having premarital sex...maybe she'll shag me, too? Oh, and the bonus is that if she does, I won't have to worry about knocking her up!"

I am apalled. But this was 1964. I'm sure things were a lot different back then. But here is my mom, 18 years old, from a strict Polish-Catholic family, pregnant and alone, probably scared to death of what all of this would mean. And this jerk tried to prey on her.

Bleh.

But what this whole story does do is to make me feel a lot better about not having any symptoms of pregnancy. I'm a lot like my mom in many ways: we look alike to the point that people have asked if we are sisters, we talk alike in meter and accent, we have many physical ailments that are similar, our hands look identical.

And I would not be surprised if I don't have a single symptom of pregnancy, because I am just like her.