Trials and tribulations of discussing RPL with my Asian mom

Disclaimer: I wrote this really fast. I'll try and find any spelling or grammar errors later.

I recently read the 'Tiger Mom' article about the asian way of raising children. It was an interesting read because quite frankly, I lived that to some degree going up and how difficult it was to tell my parents about our losses, and our problem.

A little background on my asian upbringing: I'm actually a former refugee and immigrant to Canada. In fact, my parents were one of the boat people who fled Vietnam in 1980 and I was born in a UN refugee camp. No joke! For the first 4 years of my life in Canada I actually had no country I was a citizen of!

I had the traditional "You will do this because we said so, and we don't have to explain anything to you" kind of parenting. When I didn't listen or did stupid things, I was sometimes spanked, hard. There were incidents that I shall not mention beyond today, more than eyebrows would be raised if someone discussed it. Those of you who know who Russell Peters is will know the phrase, "Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad..." as funny as it is when he says it, there's nothing funny when it's your own dad. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't provoke it. I once turned on the sprinkler while my dad was painting the house. Ooops.

There were also things I recall like... coming home with 80+% on my report card and my dad (and to a degree, my mom) upset that I didn't get 100%. Boys always want to impress their dad and I was no exception. Even today at the age of 30, I still find myself from time to time doing things thinking he'd be proud of me. I'm getting a bit off topic... I tend to do that.

So what does this have to do with recurring pregnancy loss? Well, I remember telling my mom when we lost our first baby. At that point, we had no idea that we had a genetic translocation mumbo jumbo problem. I told my mom that it was unfortunately quite normal to lose a pregnancy here and there.

For those of you that know my mom, this will not surprise you. She said it was because April was doing things 'wrong'. Some of the things I recall were: too much walking, our home had too many stairs and the "extra" exertion from the stairs was to blame, and eating the wrong things. She reinforced herself by saying "yup" at the end of her suggestions. She also at one point suggested April do nothing but lay in bed for a month. "yup".

Asian parents like my mom and dad 'teach' their kids by telling them what to do and expecting their kids to just do it because mom and dad "said so". That's the expectation, and that's how they were raised. You will often find asian parents (especially immigrant generation) doing things this way and getting frustrated when their kids don't "listen".

They also expect the oldest sibling to "teach" the younger siblings in a similar way. I'm the oldest of 4, and I often get the, "Your sister isn't listening to what we tell her to do. You tell her to do it". Of course, this doesn't work cause I was raised in Canada so my replies generally are "I'm not the parent, you are".

So now that you know the background, you can kind of see where this is going. When I told my mom about our RPL the responses could be preceived as borderline insensitive. I didn't tell April most of them cause quite frankly, it would not have contributed to her healing in any way shape or form.

I tried to explain it to her from how I thought April felt - it feels like we lost our baby (and we did). Her response was basically telling me that I was foolish for thinking about it like that and I was wrong because at that early stage, you can't consider the fetus a baby yet. Technically in a clinical and emperical way she was right. However 'telling' someone how to deal with their emotions is like yelling at the rain. No one will listen to the yelling.

I also explained that it's much more emotionally traumatic for her because she has the physical symptoms and hormones which make her 100x more emotional.

My mom's response: "Tell her....." argh. Mom. I tuned her out.

That's the Asian immigrant parent way of helping their kids and their kid's problems. Telling them what to do. I love my mom and dad, but they are not who I turn to if I have any issues like this. Especially anything that brings up a lot of emotion for me. I can't blame them either, it's how they were raised and that's all they know. Many first generation immigrant parents are probably the same way too. You can't change them, so you deal with it the only way you can : by not including them in when you have certain problems.

So who did I (personally) turn to for all the losses we have if it isn't my wife? Good question. When I find out one of these days, i'll let you ladies and gents know.

Child Birth: All hail the supriority of women (Part 2)

More on the miracle (and horror) of childbirth...

The movies lied. Babies do not come out clean, labour is not 2-3 pushes, and all people involved do not spend the entire time smiling.

One of my best buddies told me to stay by the head. Do not look. It never looks the same again after you watch your child come out. April also told me to stand by her head. So I did as I was told... "yes dear" and stood by her head. I should note, I had gone down to the cafeteria at some point and got myself a cup of coffee. Hey, I was up as long as she was, I was tired too! Just not as tired as she was.

To go back to the indian nurse we had in the room, this was by far the best person at the hospital during the whole ordeal. She was a former mid-wife for 20+ years in India, so she knew exactly what she was supposed to do. Our east Indian nurse was amazing. I clearly didn't pay close enough attention during the pre-natal classse and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. The indian nurse had been a midwife in India for 20 years, so she was a pro and knew exactly how to massage April's back to help with the contractions.

Then she went on her 30 minute break and we end up with another nurse. The new nurse decided that April needed an IV because she wasn't getting enough fluid (fair enough). So she went to put the needle in her right arm ... and proceeded to put it right thru her vein. Stupid newb. So she does it again on the other arm and snaps the needle. Stupid nurse! I said 'How long have you been doing this for?' and she decided to try one more time. She gets the needle in and puts the tape on. She then goes to put the IV in and part of it pops out. April then starts shooting blood from her arm 6ft across the room while going thru a contraction. She's screaming and im trying to tell her not to look. It didn't work, she was freaking out. Stupid nurse.

After a time we got to the point where the pain was too much for April. She demanded an epideral. Unfortunately, she was transitioning (the "hole" stretches from 8cm to 10cm) and at that point it's too late for an epideral.

The weirdest moment was when she started pushing. I guess her water had not completely broken, so her first push there was *POP*. You know, the sound of an overfilled waterballoon popping sound. Unlike a water balloon where the water just kind of spreads everywhere, April shot water 20ft across the room. Phew. Good thing I had heeded her advice and *STAYED BY THE HEAD*.

Now the reason I mentioned coffee earlier was because at one point of me standing by her head, she screamed at me to stop breathing on her. Coffee breath made her angry. Incredible Hulk angry. It did however seem to get her to push harder though!

After much screaming, pain, pushing, screaming, did I mention screaming? Graham was born on July 31st, 2008. 6 lb 13oz, 22" long. He coughed, and opened his eyes on his own right away. They put a clamp on his cord and gave me scissors to cut it. I completely forgot that i'm supposed to wait until it stops pulsing so I ended up spraying my pants with blood. Great.

[edit]I should note my mother in law at this moment said, "it's a boy! I KNEW IT!!!!!!"

By the way, I've learned that child birth in movies is a load of crap. It's not 2-3 pushes and the baby comes out, and it's certainly not clean like they make it look like in the movies. It is yucky, messy, and takes FOREVER.

At this point, I was so proud. Not only because I was now a parent of a miracle child, but also because I didn't look. They moved him to the heat lamp where they did the vitamin K + the goo they put in his eyes. I went over there with him and held his hand for the first time.

It was the most amazing feeling ever. It's easily one of the most amazing moments in my life. Then I turned to smile at my wife.... just as they were removing the placenta.

I had looked. I almost puked. :(

Ladies, you are the superior sex after being involved with childbirth.

However, our miracle child was born:

Childbirth: All hail the superiority of women (Part 1)

I'll put this out there first for the ladies: You are the superior sex. Sorry guys, we don't have to grow a human and then endure pushing that human thru a 10cm hole for hours.

I'll try and keep this a bit shorter - I kind of feel like im a hypocrite for having a blog about pregnancy loss and then talking about child birth.

My wife's labour started on a Monday night. We went to the hospital only to be told to go home. To cut thru the tedious part - we made 4 other trips like this. The Foothills Hospital isn't exactly the nicest place to go when you're not actually dialated 4cm or your water broke. They just send you away to labour somewhere else. Actually, now that I think about it, our health system here in Alberta leaves a lot to be desired. They pump you thru there like it's drive-thru child delivery.


So we went for walks in our neighborhood to help speed up the labour, she drank this Lebanese chai tea that helped her labour move along, and no, we didn't 'do it' to help things go along faster. It's just weird and awkward. Put a basketball between you and your significant other, yeah, it's awkward !

Over 40 hours later, my wife goes into active labour. Go figure, when we had true-blue labour (2 days after she started labour) where you have to stay at the hospital, it was 1:30am. So not only were we both exhausted, we wouldn't be sleeping thru the night either. At the hospital, it was quite a different experience than I thought. I figured we'd be put into our own delivery room right away with a nurse. Nope. We were put into labour and delivery triage with a bunch of other women who were not quite ready for a delivery room, but too far along to be sent home. I had a few memorable incidents from the labour and delivery triage at the Foothills:


1) Someone backing into my truck at 2am (I could see it from the window in the room, but couldnt do anything about it)
2) Some girl in another bed was screaming "I can't take this, i've been in labour for 2 hrs". I thought April was going to tell her off cause April was over 40 hrs at that point
3) Getting into fights with the other husband/boyfriends there. First, it was over popsicles. April wanted one cause they stocked a public fridge with them. I picked thru and took all the non-deformed ones for April. Second, we hogged the only shower for about an hour. Someone was banging on the door, I said i'm here to look after my wife and not yours and promptly shut the door. I didn't hear a thing from him after that.

We were moved into our own room at 7AM. We were assigned this east indian nurse with a thick accent my mom in law couldnt understand. My first thought was, "oh great. I'll have to translate now". My second thought was "peanuts" [ see earlier blog post for this :) ]


The doctor who came in and checked up on us was interesting. Rainbow print bandana and pink crocs! There was an anesthesiologist who was offering drugs like it was going out of style; he gave her phentynol (spelling probably is wrong). Everytime she had a contraction he was like, "oh sounds like she needs more!". I eventually got sick of him and got rid of him by saing, "what are you paid per dosage or something?".


To go back to the doc, interesting thing... she was not supposed to be doing deliveries. We later fond that out. Needless to say, the doctor's name on our son's birth certificate is NOT the one who delivered him. Besides the fact she wasn't supposed to be delivering babies, she was a fantastic doctor/birth coach (sort of).

To be continued; including my wife telling me to 'STAND BY MY HEAD AND DONT LOOK'.

Where have I been for the last year?

I started writing this blog within days after losing our 8th (or 9th) pregnancy. I was writing it because quite frankly, it felt good to talk about it. Dare I say it was almost as good as a cold beer on a hot day.

So I imagine you're wondering what changed. Well as I was reading thru my blog one day it brought back some painful memories and I could not contain myself. I made a knee-jerk decision and went the route of sticking my head in the sand. For a while, pretending that everything was fine was working. Since this blog brought on those feelings, ignoring it seemed logical, Spock logical.

Unfortunately, I still had reality to contend with, and after a few more losses, I realized that once again I was being an idiot (idjit as my wife calls me sometimes) and needed to get back to reality. I *KNOW* I can't run away from it, yet I tried anyway.

So yes! I will be writing again very shortly. I've decided to change a few things - firstly I originally thought remaining nameless would protect me but I realize that's stupid. I am open about this around my friends and family.

So a little about me: my name is Minh Tran. If you're one of those Facebook creepers and if you can find me on Facebook please feel free to friend me (make sure you mention this blog or I won't add you). Warning though: Minh Tran is the Vietnamese equivalent to John Smith. My wife's name is April, and yes, my wife is white (I married the whitest white girl as her mom said once). I may include a few details about my life in future posts, but I think i'm a fairly boring person so I don't see the need to write a bio or anything (yet).

My next post will be about the most horrific (yet very awesome) thing i've ever witnessed in my life: the birth of my son. I sometimes refer to him as our miracle child because that's what it felt like to finally see him come into the world.