The benefits of having an infertile pediatrician

I don't think that fertile folks read bitter, infertile women's blogs but maybe??? For those of you that have gone through trying to conceive hell, you know that us infertiles are very aware of our bodies. By bodies, I am specifically referring to our vaginas and more specifically to our cervical mucous. There are entire threads on message boards devoted to women discussing their cervical mucous. So while I don't ovulate regularly and rarely have the coveted "egg white" cervical mucous, I most certainly know what it looks like. (R has even showed me hers as she definitely gets it - I know, that's way more information than you wanted but that's the joy of an anonymous blog, I can share EVERYTHING).

In the past week I had 3 teenage girls coming in to see me with a chief complaint of vaginal discharge. When I see this complaint, I have horrid flashbacks to medical school and doing my gynecology rotation in an inner city hospital with lots of prostitutes - it was so gross it turned me away from going into ob/gyn. But I digress, back to my patients - all three girls were not sexually active so STD's were out of the picture (although you're never supposed to believe a teenager when they says that they're not sexually active and so I still tested all of them for STDs). All the girls were here because of "gross vaginal discharge". None of the girls could actually describe the discharge, other than saying that it changes sometimes. When I finally questioned them (each of these visits were seperate visits), the girls describe the grossest of all discharges as "kind of like snot".

On the inside I was laughing. I mean here these girls are horrified enough to come talk to a doctor about the one kind of discharge that many infertile women could only dream of. The appearance of egg white cervical mucous was definitely confirmed when I examined them. This is where the benefits of having infertilepediatrician as your pediatrician come in. Each of these girls received a thorough lesson in their cervical mucous - from watery, to creamy to egg whites... it was all discussed. I assure you that no other pediatrician is going to tell a 16 year old girl that her mucousy discharge means that she is ovulating and is very fertile right now.

This new found fertility information was followed by another thorough lesson in how NOT to get pregnant. I even carry a condom in my pocket to show girls that despite most guys telling them that it's too tight, I can put both my hands in the condom and spread my fingers as wide as they will go. If I didn't care about messing up my hair, I could probably fit it over my head and I then assure them that no boy is bigger than my head (at which point the girls laugh hysterically - I had one mom in the room with the daughter when I went over this and the mom thanked me profusely).

So having an infertile pediatrician means that you are going to have quite the discussion on fertility (more than you ever wanted to know) and that includes discussing your cervical mucous, even if the girl squirms the entire time.