I get extreme anxiety when I’m looking for a doctor. I always assume this one might be a genius and that one might be a quack. Their having to get through college and medical school doesn’t impress me; we all went to school with an idiot or two.
One of the reasons it’s so scary is that you rely on a doctor to tell you about things you don’t normally know much about. If a doctor tells you that you need surgery on your hand, you probably want to get a second opinion, but you also want to be reasonably comfortable that this doctor—and the next one—is giving you sound and informed advice.
Kimberly Severn turned out to be the doctor I’m always afraid I’ll pick. Actually, she’s not a doctor at all, but a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM), which is what I was looking for. Midwives are known to see pregnancies and births as natural states and processes as opposed to medical conditions and procedures, and they are generally assumed to be more edifying and patient than medical doctors, willing to take more time and explain more than your typical Ob-Gyn. Of course, on some level you have to assume that there are as many terse midwives as there are saintly Ob-Gyns. And until you have more than one baby and use more than one medical provider, you have only generalizations to go on. But you do have to start somewhere. So I started with Kimberly Severn, who was a) covered by my insurance and b) listed in “DC Baby.”
Now I know that there are probably hundreds of women who have worked with Kim Severn and loved her. In all honesty, I was fairly happy to have found her. But there were signs even from the beginning that she wasn’t for me. First of all, she was medically aggressive. On my first visit, she gave me a transvaginal ultrasound and took my blood and sent me off with a prescription for some hormone in case it wasn’t high enough when she looked at my blood-work. Second, she seemed more interested in telling me about her own experiences than in finding out about me. And third, she was extremely negative, preparing me at that first visit for the possibility that my pregnancy might not be viable.
At this point I should mention Ms. Severn turned out to be right. She declared the following week that my pregnancy wasn’t viable. Kudos to her, I suppose, for her good instincts, but it felt more like belief than knowledge; dates can be wrong, and pregnancies can develop differently. But there was another problem: One thing I expected from a midwife was for her to remember that while this may be her 1,234th patient, it’s my very first pregnancy. And when she told me she could schedule a D&C for that afternoon, I felt more like a medical condition than a woman trying to have a baby.
So I went to another doctor. She wasn’t particularly warm or compassionate, but she did tell me that it was too soon to be certain that the pregnancy wasn’t viable. I didn’t by any means enjoy dragging things out, but I was a lot more comfortable getting a D&C once I knew without a doubt that the pregnancy was a dud, and once I had some time to think over whether I wanted to have the procedure or let my body take care of things itself. I can see how Ms. Severn, in trying to “get it over with,” was acting in my best interest, but her methods didn’t take my inexperience or my emotional grief into account.
Three weeks and as many ultrasounds later, M- and I went through with the D&C. We were 100% sure we wanted to, and we were as ready as we could be. We talked about it with doctors and each other and we understood what was going on. And I’m extraordinarily relieved that we escaped the doubt that may have haunted us had we done it sooner.
