Doctor doctor!

I'm not sure what it is. Telling different age groups of people the big news has met with very different types of questions and comments. Telling people our age often elicits congratulatory messages (thanks to all those who did leave messages!) and pleased looks. Telling people of the older generation often elicits an ill hidden "it's about time" look that is quickly overtaken by the politically correct congratulatory message. The strange thing is, it is also often followed up with a question that seems to be very puzzling, to me. They ask after the effusive handshaking and hugging is over who my obstetrician is. I would understand if these people who asked were in the medical community, there, they might have a chance of having heard about the Ob-gyn in question. But the regular lay person on the street who has probably only come into contact with one, perhaps two Ob-gyns in their lives, really, how would they know who my doctor is, even after I've given them his full name, his practice, his age, the number of children he has, the number of partners he shares the practice with as well as his preferred method of delivery. (Ok, excuse the extremely long ranty sentence)

I wonder why they do that.

Anyway, through the course of these couple of years, I've become a somewhat expert on obstertricians, having gone through 4 before settling on my current one. There was always something wrong with the others. One made every procedure too painful to bear, another was all about false diagnoses and forcing unnecessary steps of intervention upon her patients- she tried to convince me that whooping cough was a great danger to people in Singapore and I had to be vaccinated then and there. Unfortunately for her, I had never heard of young people in Singapore having whopping cough and had read enough Enid Blyton books to know that the way you cure whooping cough was to spend 3 months by the sea :) -, the third, I stayed with for quite a while with because he was quite a sweet man. But I did have issues with him. One was that I had to wait an average of 3 to 5 hours to see him. I had visions of having burst water bags, delivering babies on his waiting room floor and conceiving all over again before I actually got to see him. The other issue I had with him was that through our many futile attempts at trying to conceive, he never could admit that perhaps it wasn't working and would always send us away with the same advice- " have a romantic dinner, open a bottle of wine and have lots of sex"- not really realising that having spent a good part of the day in his waiting room sapped any sort of desire either of us had for one another. I decided that since I was getting any older by the minute in the waiting room, had read every magazine there was available there and had given nicknames to every baby in the photo collage he had on one of his walls and would be able to pick out the babies in any sort of line up, it was time to move on, to find someone who could perhaps tell us, seriously, whether anything was wrong with us and how to fix it and possibly do all that in the same century.

The fourth one did tell us that something was wrong and how we could fix it. But she was all doom and gloom and told me that unless I was willing to shell out a whole lot of money, I wasn't ever going to have a kid. I think I ran away from that one bawling my eyes out. I swore at that point, I wasn't going back to a public hospital again, no matter how much less they cost and how senior this consultant lady was.

That's when I chanced upon our present Ob. I'd read about him on the forums before. I was particularly amused by some women who would blush and turn all stuttery school girl in his presence because he was apparently so damn debonair. Of course, being debonair is not enough. Debonair was not going to get us pregnant despite what one of the mothers thought about Korean dramas. So, I ran it by my doctor brother. Surprisingly, the brother that I thought slept through medical school had actually heard of this guy. In my head I was thinking, this guy must be quite prominent if my brother, whose favourite drug to prescribe for anything is Panadol, has heard of him.

Packrat and I met with this guy and we decided that being the snobs that we are, we liked him because he spoke with a British accent and we didn't have to wait to see him. Perhaps that's why women found him debonair. Ok, that's the superficial reason. The guy was actually very thorough, asking us enough questions to qualify us possibly for an American green card and wasn't pushy. He explained all our options to us, assured us that age was on our side and didn't try to be only doom and gloom with us and taking things slowly. The added bonus, this guy had a sense of humour. He convinced me that I didn't want to look like a crack user when I tried to wrangle my way out of having injections by suggesting that I could use the nasal spray equivalent to whatever drug he wanted to have injected into my folds of fat. He's also given me fashion advice, warning me rather ominously that he would refuse to treat me if I ever turned up for a check up in one of those Peter Pan coloured, polka dotted tank maternity dresses with a big bow on the front or the back.

Well, here we are, with one we actually like and can work with. We do pay a lot more for his time, his humour and the lack of waiting time but I'm keeping all the bills and when the tyke demands a car later on, we'll produce all these bills and demand arrears plus compound interest. So, it's all good and we're happy.

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