The reality of pregnancy just hit me.

[outsidetheparty]

I was eating peas just now, taking my time at the end of the meal -- okay, playing with my food actually, splitting them apart with my fingernails and admiring how the peas always pop into neat alternating rows on each side of the pod -- and when I opened one up it appeared to have skipped a step, instead of left right left right left right it was left right left right right left, with a little withered thing on one side where a pea should have been. And I realized I was looking at the 5 percent or whatever of buds that fail to become viable. And the two adjacent ones had grown unusually large in the extra space they'd been granted.

It wasn't at all an omg-what-if-we-miscarriage worry, more of a suddenly-understanding-the-biology-at-a-gut-level kind of thing.

I meant to take a picture, but at some point between sitting down to type this out and now, I must have eaten the evidence.

Writing that made me curious, and I discovered that the first google result for miscarriage probability is a russian linkfarm selling some kind of vitamin. Whoever invested in those keywords is just cold, man.

Comments

[bsdinobaby.livejournal.com]

I say this as a geneticist, with all too much of an idea of what these probabilities are: Don't worry about the numbers. It'll just make you crazy. You do what you can, and after that, it's just biology. Biology is often messy, and sometimes seems irrational. But all of us here are the product of it, and we're well out of beta as a product.

And, seriously, just think about living life like that every day, where every time you pick up an ear of corn, you automatically see all the places where transposons have jumped, where the kernel has failed, etc. Or where you look at a tree and see the somatic mutations arising which have affected the leaf shape on that part of the tree. Or where you look at every human you meet and subconciously eye up their BMI, skin, eyes, etc. and consider how it relates to every other human you've ever met before and catalog the new variation you see and think, "Huh, I wonder why these (5 random people I've met in 30 years) all have that funny ridge on their skull where their jaw muscles attach... that's neat, I bet with a large enough sample size I could map that...I'd bet money that at least one of the alleles is in a HOX gene... that would be so cool." Yeah. Genetics. It's fun.

(and if you want good numbers, look here or just ask your friendly neighborhood geneticist).

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

Heh -- and all I get from my line of work is an uncanny ability to recognize fonts :)

[eeblet.livejournal.com]

Word on the fonts.

When I was a kid, my family had an inside joke about "one squished pea for lunch".

Try not to think too much - daddies aren't supposed to think, anyway. ;)

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Oh, sweetie.

*hug*

:-)