I’ve officially hit the stage in life where pregnancy seems more welcome than it does catastrophic. Been thinking a lot about how many of cis straight female fellow medical trainees are trying/ talking about conceiving like they can snap their fingers & make it happen, and how often I’m already hearing stories cropping up about infertility struggles, rounds of IVF, pregnancy loss. Also thinking about how often we celebrate people working until they are quite literally about to pop, and how weird it is that we’ve normalized and valorized that. Thinking about how many photos I see of pregnant surgeons hunching over operating tables with labels like “Superwoman” swimming around in the captions, how infrequently talk about how the chronic sleep deprivation and high stress levels of our training are probably just as bad for our future kids as the coffee and deli meats that we all know to avoid. Thinking about the number of people I’ve probably met who had silently miscarried and told no one, suffered in silence through those days, only to tell their stories years later on Twitter threads. Thinking about my senior who got pregnant during an “inconvenient” time, “earning” her the resentment of her colleagues when they had to reshuffle schedules to cover her.
….but also that some of those babies were so stinking cute, even when they were screaming bloody murder. (Obligatory no babies were kidnapped during this vacation, despite how many of them sent my ovaries into a flurry)
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