"What's the difference between a doctor and God?"

Answer: "God doesn't think He's a doctor."

The world of medicine can be bewildering and frightening for the civilian who is not a health professional. Doctors speak in their own language (which is devised, specifically, so that patients don't know what's going on--a lot of it's just Latin), they wear special clothes, they have years and years of special training. My mom, when we were sick and felt like vomiting, used to force us to dress in our Sunday best if we were ever going to see a doctor; the respect and awe was ingrained.

When our son first went into intensive care as a baby, my husband and I were scared out of our wits. We were desperate for someone, anyone to help him. Put it this way, mistakes were made. Because my father wanted me to be a doctor, he provided me with an interesting medical education when I was a child--I was reading college biology texts in seventh grade. So I know a little bit about how the body works, I know a bit of the medical jargon. And a few times, when I suspected a young, green resident had screwed up or was giving us bad advice, a few times a concerned nurse would subtly let me know I was right.

And it wasn't just doctors. I made sure to stay with our son at all times, scrutinze every little thing they put in his IV. Occasionally the nurses would get annoyed by my scrutiny, but just as occasionally, they would make a mistake: take his weight in pounds rather than kilograms. give a medicine every half hour when it was supposed to be on the hour. I think if it were I in the hospital, I probably would have reverted back to my childhood, "the doctor has to be right." But because it was my child, a baby who couldn't speak for himself, I think I became more assertive, despite myself, and I'm glad of it.

So if you're going to go in pursuit of biological fertility mysteries, it might be appropriate to also be in the mindset of being an advocate if not for yourself, but for your future child. You'll see in some more of my GREEN posts that the things you do even before conception can have an enormous impact on how a pregnancy turns out. A simple example: if you aren't fully loaded folate (a B vitamin that is lacking in your aveage American's diet) you aggravate your baby's risk for a neural tube defect (a serious, life threatening condition).