Northern Pregnancy

Being pregnant in the north leaves a lot to be desired....like not being able to crush late night McDonald's cravings. Or not knowing when your prenatal appointments are going to be until the day before or the morning of your appointment, or keeping your pregnancy any kind of secret for the first 3 months. However there are few things that have been extremely pleasant about it, such as just walking into the health centre whenever I feel like it and harassing some of my favourite nurses and getting immediate care. I had the pleasure of doing a few of my appointments down south last month and was totally confused when I walked into what seemed like a pre-waiting waiting room. My simple northern brain almost had a melt down of confusion when a nice lady informed me I had to take a ticket (like the kind you take at the deli counter to see who's next) and wait. So in that respect it's so much nicer just walking right into my local health centre and yelling out "Yo Nurse such in such, I need this done or this to talk to you about", with out having to advance through a plethora of waiting rooms.

I would have to say the most disruptive part about being a pregnant lady living in the north is that my community only has a health centre, meaning I have to hike it out of town to deliver. All pregnant ladies must leave their communities and family's behind and head over to the larger communities that have hospitals, in my case I would have to go to Iqaluit. I must leave my community an ENTIRE MONTH before my due date and and would potentially live in Iqaluit, alone. What makes this seem even more appealing is that they call this time period confinement. How delightful.

Well there is no way that I'm going to live by myself for over an entire month, especially in my last month of pregnancy. Who is going to give me back rubs? We have made the choice that I will leave the north 6 weeks before the due date and live down south with my family. This will be extremely hard being away from Nathan, but at least in this situation I will be with my family and not sitting alone in empty Iqaluit hotel room for an entire month. My heart really does go out to all the ladies in Nunavut that have to go through this, they must be hard core mommas. Granted some of them have family or friends living in the big city, a lot of them are all by themselves.

Since I'm leaving 6 weeks before and such a distance away Nathan is at risk of missing the birth more so then if I was staying in Iqaluit, but this is a chance we are willing to take. At least if I do go into early labor, I will have my sister-in-law, mother-in law and mother. We also had to get special permission to make sure that Nathan could get time off preceding the due date so we would have a better chance of him being there. Now at this point all we can do is hope, hope that I don't go into early labor and have to get medi-vacd out of the community or hope that nothing goes wrong with the pregnancy and also have to get medi-vacd out. And if all goes well, we have to hope that Nathan will indeed make the birth. But that's a ways off and there is no sense in spending time worrying about something you can't control. Like many things in the north, you just have to ride the wave.

In other news, I weighed myself today on my bathroom scale. I have been warned not to do this, but curiosity got the better of me and I was horribly shocked for it. I won't be doing that again unless I need to cure the hiccups or something. Here is a photo of me back in Nunavut, as you can see two large icebergs in the distance (these are the ones Matt over at M&M Dorset Newbies has been out shooting). I'm 22 weeks along here and if you think I'm not freezing my butt off because I'm in a t-shirt, your wrong. It's all of 5 degrees right now, I just took my coat off for the belly factor in the photo.