What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

the pregnancy.
    11. Synthetic estrogen causes birth defects. It caused my birth defects from DES.
    12. Exhaustion, nausea, anemia, frequent need to urinate, sore breasts, sore hip joints, and reflux are all symptoms of pregnancy.
    13. I didn’t need to take estrogen.
    14. I took prescription pregnant horse estrogen for fourteen years.
    15. I was never infertile.
    16. A home pregnancy test is only accurate in the first trimester.
    17. Dylan was right when he told me in March that I was pregnant.
    The Jewish High Holidays are called the Days of Awe. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, God opens the Book of Life and inscribes the fate of every human being in it—who shall live and who shall die, who shall be healthy and who sick, who shall be happy or unhappy—but God’s judgment is not finalized until the book is closed ten days later, on Yom Kippur, the day of fasting and atonement. “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed.”
    I did not take Julia to the Rosh Hashanah children’s service, as I’d planned. I had to find an obstetrician. Pregnancy trumped synagogue. Michael and I told a few people about my pregnancy: Julia. My sisters, Madeline and Jennifer. Michael’s sister, Christie, and his mother, Daisy. My dad. Sue.
     
     
    “Julia, sit down. We have exciting news,” we told her on Saturday morning.
    “What?”
    “I’m going to have a baby.”
    Julia’s eyes opened wide and her jaw dropped, like in the cartoons. “Really?”
    “Really. In three months.”
    “Excuse me while I drop dead for a minute. Bleh!” She flopped over on the couch.
    Michael and I laughed. Julia bounced back up.
    “Could you tell me that again?”
    “I’m going to have a baby in three months.”
    “Excuse me while I drop dead again. Bleh!” She flopped over again on the couch, bounced up again.
    “Wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me that a long time ago your doctor said that you could never have a baby, and that’s why you adopted me?”
    “The doctor made a mistake.”
    “Excuse me while I drop dead again. Bleh! . . . Wait a minute. Does that mean that this baby will be yours and Michael’s baby? Will I be the sister? Or will I be the half sister? Or the stepsister? Wait a minute, what does that make me?”
     
     
    Julia had for several years begged me for a baby sister or brother, but recently had dropped that request and appreciated her rock-solid status as a single child hugely outnumbered by parents and grandparents—me, Brad, Michael, her off-site birth parents (not an active presence, but part of her backstory), and Julia’s gaggle of grandparents—my dad, Brad’s parents, Michael’s parents. It was now dawning on her that she might not be permanently assured her position as the center of our collective universe.

Untouchable
    A pregnant woman with no prenatal care for twenty-six weeks is a lousy insurance risk. She might be a drug addict, an alcoholic, an illegal alien, a criminal, a teenager, crazy, deluded, HIV positive, uninsured, or—worst of all—litigious! To an obstetrician, she represents an expensive malpractice liability and higher insurance premiums. A forty-four-year-old pregnant woman in her third trimester, with a deformed uterus and no prenatal care can be, for an obstetrician, professional suicide.
    No high-risk obstetrician would see me. I was an Untouchable. Sue recommended Dr. Carrie Rosenbloom, a celebrated high-risk ob-gyn who recently delivered twins for Sue’s friend Erica. Rosenbloom spoke to me on the phone. It was against her policy to take on a new patient so far into a pregnancy.
    My insurance plan, I discovered, sucked. I had Oxford’s Liberty Plan (bad), not their Freedom Plan (not-so-bad). Liberty was the only Oxford policy that freelancers could buy. Doctors despised it because they were paid so little and so late.
    “I called all the high-risk obstetricians I know,” said Dr. Riley on Monday, “but no one will see you this far into the pregnancy. Ask your