AT WHAT COST?

Stop me if you've heard this one. What do you call the person who graduated dead last in their medical school class?.............Doctor!

I've had several people mention lately, how important it is to do our own medical research, and not just assume that our doctors are always going to do what's best for us. They are not the gods that most of us were brought up to believe them to be. They are fallible humans, just like the rest of us, capable of having a bad day or slipping up. One person also commented on the fact that my kids were "miracle babies." Yes, they most certainly were, but the true miracle was that I never gave up, and never assumed that my doctors must know what was best for me, since they had medical degrees and I didn't.

I had two different OBs run tests after I had several miscarriages. They both said "There's nothing wrong with you. It's just bad luck," and "Just keep trying. That was God's way of telling you those babies just weren't meant to be." Hogwash! I'd been reading about miscarriages, and they almost always occur within the first six weeks. My pregnancies always lasted three months. In fact, I could predict almost to the day when the spotting would begin. How could that just be "bad luck"?

So, I kept looking, and reading, and talking, and asking, and my friends kept asking too, until finally one of them told me "My cousin knows someone who had the same problem, and there's this doctor at Texas Women's hospital..." This doctor did the exact same test as the other two, but when he looked at the pictures, he immediately noticed my "room divider" - an almost invisible membrane separating my uterus into two compartments which, of course, was causing my babies to run out of room... right at three months.

How did that membrane get there? Well, no one knows for sure, but my mother did have one miscarriage just before she had me. That was right about the time when doctors were handing out D.E.S. willy nilly to anyone who'd ever had a miscarriage, because the pharmaceutical companies had them convinced that it could prevent them. Only, woops! Turns out it really didn't make that much difference as far as miscarriages went. Instead, it just totally screwed around with the reproductive organs of any female offspring who had been exposed to it in the womb.

So, yeah, it's way easier to just place ourselves in the hands of the professionals, and trust in them to know and do what's best, but at what cost?