Wingardium Lysteriosa

Last Friday lunchtime, I attended a banquet/ribbon-cutting type deal for the opening of a new manufacturing facility that makes tanks.  There was a tank parked in the room, next to the stage.  Cool.  The two Republican Senators for North Carolina were there, warbling about THE WAR ON TERRAH, and how the new company had a DIRECTIVE FROM GOD to PROTECT OUR MEN AND WOMEN, SO THEY CAN PROTECT . . . OUR FREEDOM.  It was like Braveheart, only with more red white and blue bunting.  And the soundtrack wasn’t nearly as good (think: I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free . . .)   Then came many hours of very boring speeches which were little more than a list of names, and two very stimulating video presentations with lots of fun roadside bomb attack footage.

 

After the long-winded celebration of mediocrity which is every civic event in this town (except Relay for Life!  Which really accomplishes things!  I’m not being facetious!), we made our way through the wads of patriotic bunting to the tables for lunch, where potato salad, cold roasted pork loin, and some nasty foodborne illnesses were laid out and waiting for us to consume them.

 

How unsettling is it for a 19 weeks pregnant woman to receive a phone call from the ______ County Board of Health, asking if she attended the ribbon-cutting on Friday and was she maybe suffering from food poisoning symptoms?  Because if so she could possibly have some pregnancy complications and perhaps she would like to make an appointment with her doctor, like, now.  Well, after she gives us a list of everything she ate at the banquet.

 

Let’s take a break from our recap and lemme tell you about a little thing called lysteria monocytogenes.  L. monocytogenes is a squiggling little bacteria that “is ubiquitous in the environment” but predominantly infects people through contaminated food, like in raw or undercooked (or cooked and chilled) meats and seafoods, or unpasteurized dairy products.   It’s pretty darn rare – only 4.4 cases per million people (all of these facts, by the way, are from my favorite non-verified easy access source, Wikipedia).  30% of these cases, though, occur in pregnant women.  Want to know what lysteria does to your baby when you’re pregnant?  It kills it.  Pretty much without fail, it’s gone baby gone.  Or, to put it more euphemistically (as my CNM did at my appointment today), “contraction of lysteriosis will lead to an early termination of the pregnancy, with expulsion of the fetus.”

 

I know how rare lysteria is.  I know how few women contract it.  When I got the phone call yesterday, I did not panic.  I calmed my nervous husband.  I calmed my frantic assistant, who had received the phone call while I was out at lunch yesterday and paced up and down for an hour waiting for my return.

 

Last night when I got home from our work party at 9pm, I did not panic.  I pet the animals, put on my pjs, and crawled in bed, fell asleep just fine.

 

This morning when I woke early so I could get to work early, I was cool as a cucumber.  No fetal movements that I could detect, but he’s still very small, so that’s no biggee.  No big deal.  No problem.  Cool.

 

At 9 when I got back in my car and drove an hour back to my doctor, I started to panic a little bit.

 

Once I’d arrived at the doctor’s office, my heart was pounding.

 

Whilst waiting in the exam room I started thinking of ways to tell people that we’d lost the baby because I succumbed to the Pregnancy Hunger Monster and ate cold cooked pork at a banquet, when I know I should choose to starve to death rather than eat meat that is not steaming hot.**

 

When my CNM (Certified Nurse Midwife, by the way) laid me out on the table and swabbed my belly in cold jelly, I tried to breathe normally.  When she didn’t find the heartbeat right away, every muscle in my body tensed.  She moved the Doppler thingy up, down, and around my lower abdomen, nary a crack in her smile as she made small talk – but I could SEE her ear cocking ever closer as the seconds ticked by and nothing came up.

 

Tick.  Tick.

 

And my heart stopped.

 

And then his heartbeat started swish swish swishing out of the Doppler.  I heard a fwoosh sound, like someone bumping into a live mic, and she said – Oop!  That’s a fetal movement. Fwoosh, fwoosh – Oop!  There’s some more.  We could barely hear the fetal heartbeat what with all the fetal movements, and the fetal healthiness that was going on in my womb was pretty evident and pretty wonderful.  She smiled, I smiled, and then she said (with more euphemisms that I will spare you) that if I’d caught lysteria at a banquet on Friday, the baby would have died by now.  So the fact that he is manifestly not dead and waving his little arms and legs all over the place is proof positive that my foodborne illness did not harm him at all.

 

Fly away, little lysteria scare.  Wingardium lysteriosa, for all you Harry Potter fans.

 

And now, you can lock me in a tower, test all my food for bacteria before I eat it, and while you’re at it remove all sharp objects, stairs, and loud music from the premises.  And also install a shocking mechanism in my bed so that when I sleep on my back (another no-no for the pregnant, doesn’t this make you wish you were?) it will shock me, or else pick me up and turn my on my left side(the best side, so they say, for fetal health, and WHAT? And WHY?  Don’t ask, just do), which is maybe just where I should stay for the next five months.  In bed, on my left side, being fed intravenously through a sterilized tube, counting fetal movements and practicing my Kegel exercises.

 

Genuinely though? If that’s what it took?  I’d roll up my sleeves, select the most comfortable pjs I could find, stock up on DVDs, and do it.  Once you’re in – you’re in.  I’m very glad we’re still in.

 

**Another nurse had told me that most doctors still eat cold meats, as long as they are reasonably certain the meats have been stored properly.  I think I’m all done with cold cut combos from Subway, though, after this adventure.