Being pregnant in New York City, feels a bit like being part of a cattle call. Despite my best efforts to find the best OB/GYN available to me in my area, I have never been so lost in the process as I have been in the past few months.

Despite the research that I had done to find “The Best Doctor in NYC,” it has not necessarily been the best experience.

Being that this is my first child, I approach the experience with a lot of the normal feelings. Fear, joy, inquisition and wonderment. However, I find that my doctors don’t quite share in this and are just trying to get through hundreds of women a month.

Medicine is supposed to be clinical and they have been professional but aloof.

I know nothing about being pregnant, despite being an A-Type person somewhat control freak, obsessive researcher. I have allowed myself to be open to the process.

I have no choice.

I’ve been dutifully attending every appointment. I have been allowing for every test required and suggested. I have headed the warnings that being a mother over 35 years old, opens me up to the title “geriatric pregnancy” even though I still act like a child. Children can have children as far as I’m concerned. Every sonogram/ultrasound, blood test, endocrinology test, insurance bill, recommendation, wives tale, I had justified. Partially on the guilt that maybe this is the price I have to pay for having my first child so relatively late in life.

I also suffered the personal consequence of keeping my pregnancy a secret to everyone I know. My family, friends and co-workers. Very few actually know I’m pregnant today. So I had very few people to consult with when it came to questions I had about my pregnancy. My mother knows, and her experience with pregnancy was so different than mine. The recommendations 35 years ago are nothing recognizable to the the ones I’m abiding to now. It is literally a lifetime ago.

I’m a girl that grew up with new encyclopedia, I researched every new word or though I encountered. I had been this way as long as I remembered, and thankful that my research proclivities and the technology seemed to go hand in hand throughout my education and life learnings.

Despite how I felt about myself and where I was physically and emotionally in life – the research proved that once you hit 35, your ability to have children drops off a cliff, infertility is highly likely and your baby will probably be born with disabilities and all the bad things.

Cause that’s what the research says. That’s what the internet makes you believe. I was already a dried up fish.

So when I got pregnant at the ripe old age of a month into 36 I was shocked. I was not quite prepared because based on my research it would take me at least 6 months or up to a year, to become pregnant.

Do we think we know too much? Does the internet make us believe that we know more than we really do?

People have been giving birth for thousands of years. Without sonograms, without scientific studies, without pre-natal vitamins. We have been able to sustain our familial lines and mankind, mostly under the charm of the unknown.

Do we insist on knowing too much? Does knowing too much make us do more than is necessary?

Is this information really marketing pregnant woman scans and prodding they might not need? Or is our need as a society, especially in NYC, that everything be perfect – affecting our ability to live through life’s unknowns? Have we all become such data driven control freaks that we must use everything in our power to beat the odds?

I’m not sure how it is to be pregnant in any other part of the country, but I’m pretty sure that in NYC, we are all A-Type know it all’s. There are over a million of us. That’s great business.

And so, being pregnant in NYC is like a cattle call. We start off as new mothers, ignorant to what is normal and what isn’t and we are told to take tests. If we question the tests, we are told the odds. Even though we never question the odds. Our blood is drawn, our insides are photographed and scanned and our insurance is debited.

I had dutifully been following the regimen and required visits. My test results had seemed to be within the proper percentages and normal. Except, when I had an early anatomy ultrasound.

My baby is not one that likes to be photographed, but the images she did allow us to have showed us problems with her development. We found a cyst in her brain and abnormalities in her kidneys.

There is not a sufficient amount of googling that helps alleviate your fear when you are told that there are any abnormalities. They throw the facts and figure your way to digest, they give you the proper spelling of the abnormalities so you can yourself research. Then they tell you the best thing for you to do is see some more specialists and have an amnio.

You are told this very cool and clinical. Very mater of a fact. Which does nothing for the human side of your experience.

It didn’t help that I received this information days before Christmas.

I’ve always been a gut driven person. My gut has been the one thing that if I stray away from, I find myself with insomnia, questioning my decisions against my gut. When your gut just so happens to be harboring a new being, things feel a little different.

Again, with no one to talk to, the only other source I had were some anonymous forum dwellers on pregnancy sites. Clinical facts vs. stranger danger – I ended up on the side of medicine. Which hasn’t treated me like I had a side, just treated me like a widget on a conveyor. I had to balance the odds. Balance the costs. Balance my feelings to come up with a decision.

So yesterday, against my gut, but with my gut getting ready for an amniocentesis, I made my way to the doctor.

We took another sonogram and after all the time and prayers, and small things I thought would help my baby, her brain cyst and kidney abnormalities cleared up.

The doctor asked “Do you still want to go through with this?”

I asked her if the scans were normal do people forgo the amnio, but she said “I would do it anyway, because amnio’s can tell you terrible things… I have nothing to gain to do the procedure.”

Sure. Sure you don’t. I see my insurance bills.

Despite my thoughts, I was poked and prodded. Prayed that the test wouldn’t hurt my baby and after 15 minutes of waiting at the doctor, I was sent on my way.

“Is a shooting pain normal from your gut to you vagina?” I asked the doctor before we left.

“Cramping can be anything and there is nothing we can do if it is more serious, call your doctor.”

As it stands, I’m on the conveyor belt to wait for my results. Bed ridden for 48 hours to make sure the test doesn’t cause anymore harm to my pregnancy.