Make your doctor happy

Maybe it’s just the hormones talking, but I love my doctor.

Yep, it’s the hormones.

My doctor has a tactlessness about her which is quite terrifying to a pregnant lady. For example, she doesn’t open with, “The test results were normal” – she opens with, “I’d like to do more tests.”

But now I know her pattern, I can brace myself – saving my panic for when she actually says something is wrong (which has never happened, and probably never will).

The thing I love about my doctor is that on our first meeting (when I was still quite sick from some Indonesian food poisoning) she recommended that I cut out lactose and gluten indefinitely.

Not. Going. To. Happen. (This is not the bit I love, by the way.) Dairy is probably my favourite food group (other than chocolate) and I loooovvvveee bread. I’d just gone on my own one-week elimination diets of each group, and it was both horrific (I just couldn’t handle the change in routine) and pointless (I was still sick, and unable to eat the only healthy food I like).

By our second visit, however, we had conversations like this:

Doctor: I’d like you to switch to low-fat milk.

Me: No.

Doctor: Do you think you could. . . try it?

Me: How about I cut down on my chocolate a little instead?

Doctor: *sigh* Okay. And dark chocolate has less fat than milk chocolate.

Me: Okay, I can incorporate that.

Doctor: Fine.

A few days ago, I went for my first official pregnancy checkup. (Everything is fabulous, by the way.) While taking my blood pressure, she advised me to incorporate more fish and nuts in my diet.

“I have,” I said, reeling off three fish I’m eating that have low amounts of mercury (shark, sadly, is high in mercury – so no weekly fish and chip shop visits “for the baby”). “I’m eating a lot of nuts–”

“Especially walnuts.”

“Especially walnuts – I bought a pack of just walnuts to mix with the rest – and so many vegetables that I’m visibly bloated, see?”

She beamed at me with the shining eyes of a health professional seeing a patient actually eat properly while pregnant. I’ve never seen her look like that before.

She was still glowing with surprised satisfaction as I went away.

In other news, I’ve discovered ginger beer is useful for temporarily quelling nausea – so this morning, unable to face cereal, I drank ginger beer and ate weetbix sandwiches (that’s a wheat biscuit split carefully in half and spread with peanut butter and honey).

In news that I’m sure will be hilarious to some of you, the sight and smell of chocolate now grosses me out. To be fair, that’s true of almost all food (or indeed the thought of food, or a picture of food).

Worth it.