SiL the doctor was preggers for the first time. A couple months after finally calming down from her baby’s betrayal (how dare it be a boy!), she goes in for yet another round of ultrasounds. Being a doctor, and at the beginning of the pregnancy still finishing her residency ER rounds, she got about four times as many tests as a non-doctor woman.
The screen is in full view of SiL. This is normal, usually they point “oh look, there’s his hand!” to the Mom-to-be. But this Mom-to-be is a doc, terribly uptight (my reaction when I found out she’s got problems going number two was “with the way she eats and the baseball bat she keeps up her ass, I’m surprised she makes poo at all”) and convinced that “everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” She notices something in the picture… oh no, it’s an enlarged kidney!
The Gyne tells her that’s normal, it may not even be an enlarged kidney but simply that it’s growing faster than the other one, finally has to pull up pics from other patients taken one month apart to convince her that “sometimes this goes away by itself”.
SiL comes to Mom’s, spends the whole meal giving us the kind of details that most people not in the medical professions find unappetizing, followed by four hours of “oh, and now that I’d finally accepted that it was a boy! Now the fetus will die and I will have gone through all this for nothing and…” At one point the Grandmom-to-be got so angry that she actually said “I’m sorry, yesterday it was ‘he’ and ‘my baby’ and now ‘it’ is ‘a fetus’? I must be getting dull in my old age or something, this does not compute! And if the doctor said, let’s wait and see, Let’s. Wait. And. See!” “Oh, but what if it dies, what if it’s bad, what if…” She’d already decided what it was, I don’t remember the name but it’s something that turns bad in 50% of the cases (and those die quite fast) but stays completely asymptomatic in the other 50%. Of course not only did the baby have this, it was going to be one of the bad cases.
A week later, nothing strange on screen. SiL freaks out because both kidneys are bigger than the week before, nurse and ObGyn point out that the whole baby is bigger than he’d been. Oh. Right. SiL’s somewhat relieved but still mumbling to herself “but what if it’s bad?”
About the time the baby was due, enlarged kidney on screen again. SiL is completely freaked out, the local docs decide to ship her up to a hospital one hour away because this could be to a number of things and most of them aren’t any real problem, but she keeps saying “it’s (what she’d decided it was two months before)” and cursing everybody out, and the best neonatal specialist is in that other hospital, and they’re going to have to work with her, so in case it really is bad better if she gets the news from someone else and can’t blame a local doc for whatever it is. (The lack of breath if you tried to read that without stopping is intended; next time take a break).
The neonatal specialist takes one look at the current ultrasound and says “that ain’t nothing, one in a thousand cases and most people never even find out they’ve got anything funky.”
The kid is getting treated for it, but well… once we heard the details on the actual diagnosis, Mom made me promise that I would never, ever, tell The Nephew’s parents about great-grandma’s funky kidney. The one that she found out about when she was 53. The great-grandma who died at 96 in her sleep and the official diagnosis was “old age”, who had been deaf for the last couple years but didn’t have diabetes or high blood pressure or anything. Mom doesn’t want SiL to be able to use great-grandma’s genes as a throwing weapon, you see.