I'm one of these people that likes to look, like when if I donate blood or something, whenever there's needles. You know, the sort of conventional wisdom is, “Look away.” I'm like, “I'm not looking away. If I can see what you're doing and I can see it going in then I'm in, a bit more in control of the situation and I can psych myself up for it.”
Otherwise you're just sort of, you know, I've got no idea. You know, it's a sort of “When are you going to torture me next?”. So consequently I wanted to see. So the consultant sort of positioned the scan machine so that she, I was able to see the picture of the needle and the fetus, and see what was happening.
And I think they just put a little sort of numbing cream on your stomach, Bonjela-like, and just to numb the actual piercing of the needle through the stomach. So I had to obviously lie quite still. And then she put the needle through my skin and it felt like, similar to a needle going through a skin for other injections and what have you, nothing overly different to what I would have expected, except deeper.
And so I felt that prick going in, although it wasn't painful, but I could feel, had the sensation. And then it moved in, and then it seemed to be moving through nothing. There was no resistance as she was continuing to push it. And then I could feel it on like a second layer of skin underneath, but this skin was much harder than the skin on the surface of the body. And she sort of pressed it and pressed it, and I could feel the pressure and feel the pressure, and then suddenly 'phut', it went through and it hurt a bit.
And I jumped - which obviously you're supposed to keep really still. Here's the needle, here's the fetus, you know. You don't want the needle to go anywhere near the fetus, and I just literally jumped, because it was really shocking. It went sort of, you know, it was pressure, pressure, pressure, and I just thought, “Oh, she'll be sucking the fluid out now”, and she wasn't. It was, it was the, literally the amniotic sac, very tough cookie.
And then she'd managed, and then when she punctured through that it, you know, the, it really - it hurt a bit, but it wasn't so much the pain that was a problem. It hurt a bit, it wasn't hugely painful. It was the fact that it was this kind of, a major sort of pop through, you know. Pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pop. And I was just like, “Oh, my gosh,” you know, sort of, “What are you doing? You're getting straight into my very essence of being, you know."
And then obviously I jumped and she sort of said, “Oh, you know, it is a bit of a pop, you know. And it, that was going through.” And obviously at that point you realise just how invasive it is, really. |
