Halfway down the Danube

Heat

It's been a very hot weekend in Bucharest.

Temperatures topped out at 38, but most of Friday and Saturday, they were hovering in the 30s. (For Americans: it was in the 90s, with a peak around 100.) That wasn't so bad, but the humidity... well. I went for a short walk on Saturday afternoon, and the streets were empty of pedestrians. Even the vicious dog who lives down Strada Brasilia, who snarls and lunges whenever I pass, didn't budge from under its car. I came home after half an hour and my t-shirt was drenched in sweat.

Sunday evening, the heat broke with a sudden unexpected cloudburst. It started as a sunshower, drops of rain from a clear sky. Then some clouds moved in, and it began to just pour -- fat raindrops spattering down, the pavement dancing. I took shelter under a balcony. Cars started honking their horns. Some people ran for cover, but others were hopping around yelling, or just standing with arms outstretched and faces turned up.

Afterwards it was still humid, but cooler, and when the sun went down the night was almost tolerable.

Random note: Bucharest has a climate rather like the US Midwest. I spent three years in central Illinois, and this is pretty familiar. But expat friends from Europe and (especially) Britain seem to find it pretty savagely extreme.

People who are not me

A short visual guide to people who are not me.

This is one of Michaela Roessner's animal masks. Not me! But I enjoyed her Renaissance fantasies.

This is popular anime character Yugi Moto. Not me! Dapper fellow, ain't he.

This is dead terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Again, not me!

However closely this resembles my passport photo, this fellow is not me.

I don't play softball.

Apparently my voice sounds like his. But deeper. Much deeper.

I'd like to think I am less annoying than him. Probably not true!

I don't know any Linux at all.

None of these people are me.

And this is not my new apartment. Or even my old one.

Day Twenty-Three

It's not getting much better.

The physical symptoms have disappeared, but my attention span is still down. Sleep cycle seems to be less disrupted, but that's probably just because the wife and children are out of town. Still suffering from mild aphasia, forgetfulness, and slight but noticeable sluggishness.

This is a bit worrying. We're talking coffee here, not heroin or methamphetamine. Surely I should be feeling more normal by now.

A possible clue: drinking herb tea seems to help a little. But only a little; and I dislike pretty much all of the sorts of herb tea that are available around here.

At this point I'm going for a month. One more week. After that... I don't know.

Be still my beating heart

Danica McKellar answers your math problems.

Maniu (1)

Who was Iuliu Maniu, and why should anyone care.

First the "who". He was a prominent Romanian politician between the wars. Born in Transylvania, under Austro-Hungarian rule. Educated by Jesuits. Became an activist for Romanian rights -- back in those days, before 1918, Romanians were an oppressed majority in Transylvania. Then after the First World War, he got active in politics in the new Greater Romania, as head of the Peasants Party.

Blah blah, so what. Okay, some interesting things about Maniu.

1) He was honest. Rigorously, seriously honest. Didn't take bribes, didn't strive to make himself or his family rich, didn't even lie much. This was very unusual in interwar Romania. That was a deeply and flagrantly corrupt period; in those days, everyone was for sale, political power was universally viewed as a path to personal gain, and an honest politician was one who would stay bribed.

2) He was a liberal democrat. He truly believed in democracy, checks and balances, a free press, human rights, and all that good stuff. Again, a little weird in interwar Romania, where everyone paid lip service to democracy but in practice the country wobbled between various forms of corrupt authoritarianism.

In the 1930s in Romania, it was said that there were only three men in political life who couldn't be bribed. These three "incorruptibles" were Codreanu, the leader of the Green Shirts, who was a fascist with mystical tendencies; Antonescu, the "Red Dog", who was the fierce and stern general who eventually became Romania's military dictator; and Maniu, the lonely democrat.

Maniu had a roller-coaster career marked by an unfair share of horribly bad luck. For instance, he became Prime Minister in 1928, breaking the decade-long grip of the deeply corrupt Liberal Party... just in time to lead the country into the Great Depression.

Then in 1930, he helped organize the return of King Carol II from exile. Maniu knew that Carol was tricky and untrustworthy, but he extorted a list of promises from him (that he'd govern as a constitutional monarch, put aside his hated mistress and take back the Queen, etc.) in the hopes that Carol would keep at least some of them. Maniu sentimentally hoped that Carol the sly, nasty boy might have matured into a responsible, decent man and monarch.

In fact, he had just gotten slyer and nastier. The adult Carol was lecherous, greedy, corrupt, and utterly selfish. The restored King broke all the promises within days, leaving Maniu heartbroken.

Maniu spent most of the next 15 years in opposition: to the wretched King Carol, to the growing power of fascism, and finally to the military dictatorship of Antonescu. Throughout the dark years of the '30s and the darker ones of WWII, he never stopped trying to stand up for human rights, human dignity, and the common people of Romania.

In 1943, when it became obvious that Romania was losing the war, he entered into a strange sort of alliance with Antonescu. The two men cordially loathed each other, but the relationship was tempered by grudging mutual respect and a common desire to serve their country. Maniu wanted to get Romania out of the war -- he had always opposed it, viewing the alliance with Hitler as a hideous mistake -- while Antonescu wanted to use Maniu to talk to the Allies about a "soft landing" for Romania.

To make a long and complicated story short, it didn't work out; the Allies had already given the USSR a veto power over negotiations with Romania, and the Soviets were determined to impose a Communist government. Antonescu ended up arrested -- locked in room with the royal stamp collection -- and Romania switched sides, joining the Allies, while accepting a Soviet occupation.

And Maniu? The Communists put him on trial, in 1947, for a bunch of entirely imaginary crimes against the state. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. They sent him to Sighet prison, the special "prison of the ministers". After five years of misery and solitude, he died there; the circumstances are unclear, but it was probably from some combination of exposure and pneumonia. The Communists buried him in an unmarked mass grave.

It's a sad story. But that's not quite the end of it. More in another post, shortly.

Stoop sales

Brooklyn has stoop sales. Some explanation.

A 'stoop' is what New Yorkers call the assemblage of front steps leading to the front door of the row houses called 'brownstones'. Brownstones can range in quality from luxurious to tenement. Perhaps you remember the Guns 'n Roses song, "Mr. Brownstone"? That was the tenement kind.

The word 'stoop' comes from the Dutch, one of the last remnants of the old patroon and Knickerbocker era of the city. Old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam.

Anyway. My neighborhood has brownstones ranging from 'renovated beyond the dreams of yuppie avarice' to 'hey, we get by, whaddaya'. But what they all have in common are stoop sales. Especially on a nice summer's day.

What's a stoop sale? It's like what in the American Midwest we'd call a 'rummage sale' or what in Britain they'd call a 'jumble sale'. Basically, you collect all the stuff in your apartment you don't want anymore, bring it down to stoop level, and sell it, becoming a street vendor for a day.

To drum up business, you might advertise it beforehand, with flyers or chalk messages on the sidewalk. Or one of the kids in the building will sell lemonade, or you make cookies. Generally it's a communal effort of everyone in the building. More variety of stuff.

They're neat to browse. You usually have a class mix of stuff, because not everyone in the building will typically come from the same socioeconomic stratum. And since Brooklyn is a city of immigrants, both foreign and domestic, you can find things from all over the world.

There are a lot of readers in Brooklyn. Honest. So there are a lot of books.

And the best part is, you can see what sort of weird stuff your neighbors have been collecting for the last few years! People won't sell anything embarrassing, but this is Brooklyn, where the standards for personal embarrassment are rather high. "Yeah, I'm a transvestite and a cop. So what?"

The neatest thing I saw this last round of stoop sales was a hat being worn by the attractive woman minding the stoop. It was a fez. It was a red velvet fez, with a tassel, a star and crescent, and the word 'SALAAM' in gold brocade on the front.

It was so cool.

(No, I didn't get it. Frankly, it looked much better on the woman. But it was so cool nonetheless.)

Sweep the kitchen

Sometimes Friday is Miscellaneous Links Day.

Songmeanings.net, where you can finally discover what the hell the lyrics of your favorite pop song meant. (Or, more likely, didn't.)

Some disturbing subway art from Seoul, Korea. Did you know that Koreans don't much like Japanese? Okay, did you realize just how much?

And speaking of Japan: I like sushi. And I like chocolate and cookies. But I'm not sure I can support this. (Claudia and I sometimes call this the Caligula Principle: don't combine urges.)

No list of links is complete without the latest from Rathergood. Warning: they like the moon.

What would your Pope name be? Find out at the Pope Name Generator.

Finally, I've been posting over at A Fistful of Euros. Here are my last two posts, on Albania and on Balkan elections generally.

Enjoy your weekend.

The block below Strada Lisbon

So there's this block.

A "block", in Eastern Europe, is what Americans call an apartment building. ("Block", to Americans, is a measure of urban distance. It has no meaning in most European cities. Another story.) "Block" sounds rather ugly to an American ear, but it's too often appropriate... most Communist-era apartment buildings are, indeed, pretty unattractive.

We live in an older neighborhood of prewar houses set on tree-lined streets. Before the Commmunist takeover this was the edge of town, a comfortable area for Bucharest's doctors and lawyers. Most of the houses got nationalized under Communism; today, most of them are suffering from decades of deferred maintenance. The streets are potholed and the sidewalks so crumbled as to be almost impossible to navigate with a stroller. Still, it's a very nice neighborhood, and we've been very happy in our house.

The neighborhood is walled along one side by blocks... big apartment buildings built by the Communist government as Bucharest's population soared in the 1950s and '60s. This gives the area a funny feel sometimes, like it was walled off, neglected and half forgotten.

Which I guess it was. A bit further west, along Strada Victorei and Bulevar Aviatorilor, are the big villas that used to belong to the Communist party elite. But our neighborhood was home to lower-level Party members, and it seems to have sort of fallen through the cracks... it wasn't scheduled for demolition (like so much of Bucharest was), but neither was it particularly well cared for. So the nice old houses peeled and sagged, but survived. Most of them were chopped up into smaller apartments. Sidewalks crumbled, ironwork rusted, gardens got very overgrown, but a time traveller from 1940 would still recognize the neighborhood... which is not true for a lot of Bucharest.

Anyway, the block. If we look out our bedroom window, there's this one block squarely in the view. It's just south of Strada Lisbon, which puts it about two blocks... er, a quarter of a mile... um, say three or four hundred meters south of us. It's a big one, twelve or fifteen stories. Built in the late '60s or '70s, of a peculiar pale yellowish-orange brick.

The block isn't beautiful. It's, well, a block. But it's been part of our landscape for two years now, and we've gotten used to it. And it has its moments. In autumn and winter, on clear afternoons, the long light of sunset hits the yellow-orange brick and briefly makes it lovely, like a mesa in New Mexico. On winter mornings, it blocks the sun for the first half hour or so, but then releases it; I remember a morning in January, watching the block's shadow pulling away from our street as the sun rose over it, and all the little birds telling each other to wake up! because the sun was here!

And then, just a few minutes ago, I watched the full moon rise over the shoulder of the block -- slowly growing from a sliver, to a half-circle, then sailing off into the velvety summer sky.

And that's all.

Day Fifteen

I quit coffee two weeks ago Tuesday.

Some of you may recall that the first week of July was a little distracting for us: sick kids, sleepless nights, barf. Well, what with the general fatigue and misery, I figured it would be a good time to go off coffee.

This made sense at the time, I swear. More broadly, I try to spend a few weeks away from caffeine every few years, just to show that I'm not completely addicted. Although, of course, I so totally am.

The headaches and whatnot passed almost unnoticed in the first few days... when both your small children are sick and so are you, another headache isn't going to be that big a deal. So that part worked, I guess. But the psychological and social effects -- the forgetfulness, shortened attention span, mild aphasia, and such -- have persisted. (As have the cravings. I have sensual, almost lustful thoughts about a leisurely cup in my favorite coffee shop.)

Go back to caffeine now? Or tolerate another couple of weeks of this, in the hope that it will get better?

You want math puzzles?

Here's a math puzzle. Taken from the 46th International Mathematical Olympiad, held in rainy Merida, Mexico:

In a mathematical competition 6 problems were posed to the contestants. Each pair of problems was solved by more than two-fifths of the contestants. Nobody solved all 6 problems. Show that there were at least 2 contestants who each solved exactly 5 problems.

Give yourself four hours and thirty minutes.

Incidentally, Romania won four gold medals, a silver, and a bronze at the Olympiad out of her six contestants.

They're all high school students.

Bungee government

That's a government that seems like it's falling, but just as it's about to hit the ground... boing!

Yesterday, PM Tariceanu announced that he wasn't going to resign after all. He says that the recent floods have placed the country in such a state of crisis that it would be irresponsible for him to step down now.

This is... half true. The floods are a big, serious issue. 10,000 people homeless from flooding, in a country the size of Romania, is a lot. And it makes sense for Tariceanu to stay on for a bit. On the other hand, he's using this as an excuse to have *no* elections this year, which is a bit much... the elections were tentatively scheduled for November, and the flood crisis should be well past by then.

President Basescu, who really wanted early elections, is going to be annoyed. And the government's prestige -- not high to begin with -- is likely to take a hit.

On the other hand, it looks like Tariceanu has firm, cross-party support in Parliament. Parliamentarians of all parties, Government and Opposition, were just settling down to a comfortable four-year stay; few of them are interested in putting their jobs at risk with early elections.

This is probably not the end of it, so watch this space.

One more

Sometimes, you find jewels in unexpected places. On BBC last night, I ran across something really cool. The site is called BookCrossing and it's a book-share meme, but one with a twist.

bookcrossing n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

So, you read a book, you register with the site, register your book (you get a unique tracking number for it), and then you leave the book somewhere to be found. You can go hunting for books that have been released in your neighborhood, you can see who picked up your book, track its progress around the world... if it ever gets that far. Chances are, someone picks it up who doesn't care a dime about the concept. But, never mind. I think it rocks. Gives good karma, too.

There is a book floating around in Bucharest, and if you're in the US or Germany, there are loads of them everywhere. 12 alone in Brooklyn! Carlos? What are you doing today?

Only connect

In her quest to track down frequent Halfway Down the Danube poster 'A Married New York City Math Teacher', essayist, editor, high priestess of citrus fruit and fellow Brooklynite Teresa Nielsen Hayden finds our humble blog, and borrows one of frequent HDTD commenter Bernard Guerrero's math puzzles.

Economist Brad DeLong posts why the PA system is broken for him.

And book reviewer James Nicoll teaches us some painless economics with his post on the Textile Singularity.

Swing low, sweet Cadillac

There's an ancient white Cadillac hearse/station wagon/ambulance parked in front of my building, complete with siren and curtained back seat/corpse depository/mobile emergency room unit. It's owned by a local animal control firm which uses it to advertise their trapping services (and to cart away the remains, I suppose). We're talking large mammals here, animals that one could theoretically use for their fur, like bears or Dalmatians. Not Mr. Mouse nor Ms. Roach.

It's so cool! If there's ever another coyote outbreak in Brooklyn, I know where to go.

The best part are the bumper stickers. But they will have to wait for the digital camera.

Floods

There is massive flooding all across Romania this week.

"Massive" here means thousands of houses destroyed and nearly 10,000 people turned into flood refugees, with ~$1 billion of damage. Five provinces have declared a state of emergency. Last time I checked, there were eight people dead and five missing, but those numbers are sure to increase.

Most of the flooding seems to be around the arc of the Carpathians. Bucharest has barely been affected. (Though I did notice that the little Dumbovitsa river, the one that runs through a concrete chute downtown, was at an all-time high.) This makes me wonder if deforestation may have played a role; a lot of trees have been cut down in Romania in the last 10 years. But that's just a guess.

It doesn't seem to have made the news outside Romania too much.

Keeping it real

A new apartment! A new high-speed Internet connection! A spare room for guests! Already filled with books!

So I brought eight bookcases via the F train to the new place. Due to the local topography of subway stops, that was two flights of stairs up to the subway -- yes, up; it's an elevated train at that part of its run -- then two flights of stairs out of the subway, and then three more flights to the fourth floor, using the American numbering.

Seven were pine, one was oak. A Brooklyn guy on one of the runs asked me what was up with the bookcase. I said I was moving. "You been doing that all day?" I nodded. He was bemused. "That's keeping it real."

(Note to self: next time, renew your driver's license before the move.)

I am thinking dinner party.

Fingers crossed

Claudia still has an ugly cough, but otherwise everyone seems to be getting better.

The boys are mostly sleeping through the night (though David wakes up at 6:00 sharp every morning), and I feel so okay that I actually went for a run yesterday. So, maybe we'll start posting again. (Or maybe everyone will fall sick again as soon as I hit "Post", so let's not count those chickens.)

In other news... there isn't much other news. It's been grey and cool and rainy here the last couple of days. Very unusual for Romania in July. The Romanian government has been dithering about whether to commit suicide or not. (Yes, really. Long story, and I'll try to post about it soon.) I have to go to the US Embassy for a presentation later today, so I must remember to shine my shoes.

Oh: Romania's GDP growth for 2005 is predicted to hit 5.5%. A bit more on that below the fold for the economy wonks out there.

Year GDP growth

2001 5.3%
2002 4.9%
2003 4.5%
2004 8.3% (!)
2005 5.5% (est.)

If we take these numbers at face value, Romania's economy has grown by about a third in the last five years.

Now, there are some reasons to question these numbers a little. And there's some context that's not obvious from this table. In 2001 Romania was just emerging from a vicious three-year recession that had reduced national income by at least 15%, so a fair chunk of that growth was catch-up. And a lot of the increase -- too much -- is going to the folks who already have most of the country's wealth and income. A lot of Romanians are only now getting back to where they were ten years ago, and a significant number are still worse off than they were even under Ceausescu.

On paper, Romania is not far from "Asian Tiger" style growth. But I've lived in a Tiger economy, and this ain't it. Bucharest is doing well, sure, but not /that/ well.

Some things are missing.

More on this in a bit, assuming we all stay healthy.

Barf

This post is about exactly what the title says. It has nothing to do with Romania, travel, politics, poetry, love, or indeed anything pleasant or fun. You might want to go away now and read something else.

So both the boys were vomiting today. Alan took the morning off, and lulled us into a sense of complacency, and then barfed twice in the afternoon. David, stealthy and cunning, didn't vomit all day long. That's because he was saving it all for a single sudden, enormous, surprise after-dinner barf.

Little kids barf in the worst way. They're big enough that they can get some serious volume and force going. And they're no longer doing baby barf, which is just milk or mush, and not particularly offensive. No, they eat real food, so they barf real barf, with the chunks and the acid smell and all of that. But they're small enough that they don't even try to aim it somewhere harmless, never mind running for a sink or toilet. No. A barfing two-year-old will spew all over himself, his toys, the carpet, the bookshelf, and his mother as she rushes frantically towards him, cupped hands outstretched.

Barfing is more than just messy and disgusting, of course. It can be scary. Little kids don't have a lot of reserves, especially when they're skinny little kids (like Alan). And they dehydrate really easy. So repeated vomiting, itself a symptom, can lead to other problems. And, scarier still, very small kids in bed can choke on it. So it's not just disgusting.

But "disgusting" is the first reaction. And here's a truth I have just learned about myself: I hate barf. Hate it. I guess I had always vaguely known this, but I never consciously realized it until the last couple of days. I think the aversion is the sort that gets energized by repeated exposure: one barf, no big deal; two days of barfing, and I'm starting to retch myself.

Anyway, it came to me last night, when I was down on my knees wiping up Alan's latest. Claudia (who was in the next room cleaning Alan himself) made some comment, and I found myself snarling at her. This is not very typical. After I had some time to think about it, I realized the emotional chain went something like "Deep, involuntary disgust -> outrage -> general foul-tempered truculence".

It passed after a few minutes. But when David made an even larger delivery this evening (pizza with black olives and salami, because I just had to share that) I had the same reaction all over again. Bit my tongue, though, because now I realized where it was coming from. You can't control your involuntary reactions, but you can control what you do about them, if you see what I mean.

And hey, parenting is nothing if not a wondrous voyage of self-discovery.

The boys are sleeping quietly in the next room. But I'll sleep on the couch tonight, with my head right by their door, just in case.

Out cold

Birthdays combined with coughing and vomiting will make you sleepy. It will then happen that you fall asleep in odd positions. And then your cruel parents come and flash bright lights at you. What's the deal, really?

And yes, the pyjamas are seasonally incorrect. So what?

Dragging

Everybody is sick.

Alan is vomiting up everything we give him. We're trying to keep him hydrated, and he seems to be in good spirits, but he's such a skinny little kid that he has no reserves. So we worry.

Claudia seems to have been hit with the same virus the boys had over the weekend: fever, cough. She's not suffering as much as they did (yet), but it's definitely slowing her down.

I've got some incredibly persistent stomach bug. For the hell of it, I went off coffee on Tuesday. The reasoning here was that the misery of caffeine withdrawal would go unnoticed in the general fatigue and wretchedness. Oddly, this seems to be working, though I do get the cravings. If "cravings" is adequate to cover 'every cell in my body SCREAMING for coffee, every half hour or so.'

Not very entertaining, I know.

Let's see. On the plus side, I'm just finishing the second book of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. This is a thinly fictionalized autobiography of Manning herself as a young, newly married Englishwoman living in Bucharest in 1939-40.

The Balkan Trilogy is one of those works that everyone recommends but nobody seems to have actually read. I was expecting it to be mediocre, and so have been pleasantly surprised. It's well written, and has a lot of fascinating glimpses of prewar Romania. Liking it so far, and will blog about it when finished.

Romania's government is still collapsed, though the Ministers won't officially leave office until next week.

There's a girl in my office who loves Nirvana. Loves it. "Come As You Are" is playing as I write this. She plays that album every afternoon around this time. And that's fine, because there's a lot of really horrible pop music here in Romania, and we got a double dose of it at the seashore (where it was basically the five hit pop songs of summer '05 played over and over again).

Totally random: when I was 15 years old, my first job was washing dishes in a restaurant (the "Golden Harvest") just outside of Old Orchard Beach, in Maine. I would work from 4 pm until 1 am, running a big damn industrial dishwasher. Hose with near-scalding water and a spray handle, high pressure, would blast the food off the plates and into the garbage disposal. Then fill up a rack of dishes and slide it into the enormous machine, pull the lever to seal the door, eight minute cycle. When I came off shift, my hands would be all pink and numb and wrinkled.

Nine or ten hours a day, six days a week. I really liked getting overtime. I was 15 years old; I wanted to buy books. It was the seashore, it was a long hot July and then an August that went on forever. I slept until noon every day. Afternoons before work I would go to the boardwalk and buy pizza, go on some of the rides.

Anyway. The restaurant played a looping tape of that summer's hits. The tape was about 90 minutes long. (Which makes sense, right? Most diners are out in less time than that.) So, I got to listen to that tape six times per day, six days per week.

Songs on it included

"Heart of Glass" -- Blondie
"What a Fool Believes" -- The Doobie Brothers
"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" -- Rod Stewart
"(You Can) Ring My Bell -- Anita Ward
"Chiquitita" -- Abba
"My Sharona" -- The Knack

To this day, I have strong feelings about those songs.

Nirvana still playing upstairs. "I love myself/better than you/I know it's wrong/what should I do."

I wonder what my little boys' summer soundtracks will be, sometime around 2018.

In other news

Romania's government just collapsed.

Short version: Romania's Constitutional Court rejected a package of laws that the government had passed earlier this year, including a law on judicial reform that is viewed as vital for Romania's accession to the EU at the end of next year.

Prime Minister Tariceanu (who has only been in office for a little over six months, remember) had said that if the Court rejected the law, he'd resign. It wasn't widely expected that this would happen. But it did, and so Tariceanu has resigned. And when a Romanian Prime Minister resigns, he takes his government with him.

What next? Well, President Basescu gets to appoint a new Prime Minister, who in turn can appoint new Ministers. (And he might just appoint all the same people to their jobs, for a minimum of fuss.) But Parliament has to approve his selection. (1) Parliament is on summer holiday now, and (2) Basescu's Liberal-Democrat-Hungarian-Conservative coalition has only a fragile majority, and (3) Basescu might prefer that Parliament reject his nominee, in order to trigger new elections.

More on this as the situation develops.

Sickening

It's madness. As a mother, my gut reaction every time something like this happens is "what kind of world are we leaving to our children."

Check Fistful of Euros and the New York Times for updates.

Happy Birthday, my little sunshine

David is two today. No cake picture as of yet (it's still early and he actually only ate the silver pearls off the cake), but two pix of the man himself with selected presents. Isn't he adorable? Of course, I may be slightly biased.

Happy birthday, my little sunshine. Get well, grow, be happy, and never lose your incredible smile.

(No. It's not a gun. It's a toy drill. That's way cooler, anyway.)

Beginner's mistake

Well. It's a scary story. Don't read it if you're pregnant. Or, maybe, you should, if you're pregnant and living in Romania. Also, you should not read this if you are squicky about a woman's inner workings. You are warned.

In order not to jinx things, we haven't announced to you guys yet that I'm pregnant again. After Benjamin, it was a scary thing to do. Months of anxiety and endless hours of worry. I can not - did not - count the times I ran to the clinic to see the heartbeat of the baby. The weeks just wouldn't pass.

But, somehow, we got over the dreaded milestone of 18 weeks, and things seemed to be fine. Baby was kicking and growing and turned out to be another boy (the fourth one, really, what are the chances of that?), and we were happy to hear that he was fine and healthy and all his chromosomes were accounted for.

Everything went off like in a textbook pregnancy.

Next stop: the big 20-week-ultrasound for physical anomalies. If you know us, it won't come as a surprise that we were a little late with that, at the end of the 23rd week. Unfortunately, this was also the week when Doug was in the States on a business trip. It couldn't be helped, though, and I promised to send him a picture of the baby as soon as I got home from the scan. We didn't really expect any problems -- I had been feeling fine, just gained way too much weight but that was due to potato chips and ice cream, not to gestational diabetes or similar.

This being a country where certain things are cheap, we could afford to get an appointment with the leading ultrasound specialist in Romania. He's booked solid until October but I lucked out and got the appointment of someone who cancelled. Let's call him Dr. P., for legal reasons.

The clinic he works in is right around the corner from us and turned out to be very spiffy. In Romania, you often find even top class doctors in small, cramped apartment-style offices, but the new clinics that cater to the wealthy and the expatriates are mostly modern and big.

The doctor himself was the very taciturn kind. I'm the very talkative kind, especially when I'm a little nervous. It's hard for me to lie on a stretcher silently, while the doctor stares at the screen that I cannot see and does his endless measuring. Finally, I broke the silence by asking if anything was wrong with the baby. No, no, the baby was fine. He printed some pictures for me, and briefly showed me the kid rolling around and waving his little hands (with all five fingers).

He gave me a towel to wipe to goo off my belly and then sat me at his desk. The baby was fine, but.

But. The dreaded but. He diagnosed me with an incompetent cervix. For all males who've never been closely acquainted with a pregnant woman, a short explanation. No, it doesn't mean that the cervix gets tested on algebra and geography and fails big time. It means that the end of the uterus, the exit, is opening up. It's a big no-no this early in pregnancy.

Babies born at 23 weeks do have a small chance of survival and there are stories galore about those who made it -- but it's not the norm. You need a lot of high tech gear, and very good doctors, and very, very much luck to get a 23-week-old fetus to survive. Most of those who do beat the odds suffer horrible long-term damage such as blindness, mental retardation, severe lung problems, the works. It's not a fate you want for your baby. And you definitely don't want to have such problems in a country where the newest prenatal technology is just not available.

Dr. P. told me that I had 2.6 cm of cervix left (you ought to have at least 4 cm). This came as a total shock to me. I had anticipated problems with the kid, maybe. Not with my body, never. My body is a fierce pregnancy machine. I can tell I'm pregnant even before the test stick turns blue. It's as if my body jumps into each pregnancy with all throttles open. No slow starts for me. And no easy endings. I never did go into labor on my own and my cervix has always been extremely reluctant to open. And all of a sudden my body betrays me?

And what to do now? Was there a magic pill? Some treatment?

The solution is bed rest. Actually, he told me simply to rest. He didn't say anything about bed rest. I know, he said, not easy with two little ones. Try to rest some during the day, though.

Somehow, this didn't satisfy me. I called my regular German Ob-Gyn with the news and I could hear her heart sinking. She gave me detailed instructions: Strict bed rest. No lifting at all. Magnesium in high doses to stop the contractions. (Not that I had felt any contractions but a cervix doesn't open without contractions, so they must have been there, ergo they needed to be stopped.) She ordered me to keep this up until week 29, then fly off to Germany until the baby was born. At week 29, he would have a fighting chance.

Remember, I was home alone with two little boys and the husband away in the US. Poor husband.

Things were arranged. I hired another nanny to cover bed times (no lifting!), my friends outdid themselves and helped wherever they could, supplying a steady stream of supportive phone calls and tacky magazines. I tried to keep a positive attitude.

It was very, very scary. Being told that your baby is about to drop out of you is frightening in the best of times. Being told this after a miscarriage or a stillbirth adds another dimension, though. You start listening to your body. A pregnant body will do odd things but when you start paying attention, these odd things take on a sinister meaning. Twinges everywhere. Odd pulling sensations. Sharp stabbing pains. After two days, I started feeling the contractions. Four times an hour, six times an hour, up to seven times an hour. The contractions hurt like hell. The baby himself was very restless, turning and kicking like mad, seemingly without a pause. Then, I got lower back pain. That's when I went into panic mode because lower back pain can indicate back labor and that basically tells you your body is trying to give birth. Now.

I called my doctor in Germany, and another doctor here in Romania. They both said, get yourself on the next plane to Germany and into a hospital. My German Ob-Gyn added, "and make your trip as little stressful as possible. I don't want you to give birth on the plane."

Easier said than done.

I had to leave my kids behind, buy the most expensive air fare ever, order wheelchair service but not tell the airline I was in labor (since they wouldn't have let me step on the plane, of course), ask my parents to pick me up and drive me to the hospital, and inform the hospital that I was coming in with problems. No stress at all.

The trip was uneventful, if long. We started an hour late, leaving my parents in knots at the Frankfurt airport whether or not the plane had made an emergency landing for their daughter. Then, it was stop and go traffic on the autobahn until Schweinfurt. All the time, I had contractions and was in pain, and scared.

The Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt is wonderful. I've given birth to all my three boys there. The doctors are great, the equipment state-of-the-art, the nurses are the best you can get. They've dealt with Benjamin's birth and death in a gentle, thoughtful, and compassionate way that helped me enormously. I love this hospital (my only gripe is the food but heh, nothing is perfect).

So I waddled into the maternity war, and the doctor on duty looked at me and said this:

"Frau Muir, I know you. Your body doesn't do labor. Your cervix never opens up by itself. I've just checked your file again. I cannot believe that there is something wrong. But - let's have a look."

And she did.

And she cursed.

Loudly.

She called it a typical beginner's mistake.

She said many things about how you cannot make such a diagnosis merely based on an abdominal scan, such as Dr. P. had performed. That you always have to back up with a vaginal scan but even without that one, she could see that the cervix was fully closed and 5 cm long. What Dr. P. saw, obviously, was just a fold in my lower uterus. She showed it to me and it looked like an opening cervix -- but I'm not earning loads of money for being Romania's No. 1 ultrasound specialist. That's why my second opinion in Romania didn't hesitate to send me to Germany - he had trusted his famous colleague's diagnosis.

Nothing was wrong. Nothing at all.

So, in the end, I was out of well over 1500 bucks for the flights but not in any danger. The contractions stopped the moment I heard the good news. Stress. It was all the stress. The lower back pain? That was just lower back pain, from lying around so much. The pain during the contractions was caused by my prior c-section scars. There had been no danger, although over time, the stress and the fear might have had the exact same result as an actual incompetent cervix. At some point, the contractions would have had an effect. So, it wasn't a harmless misdiagnosis.

The doctor himself is going to suffer little. Some of my friends have cancelled their appointments but, as I said, he's famous and booked solid, so he won't notice. "Sue him," is the American response, but that won't fly here.

I'm upset and relieved at the same time. I'm writing a letter to Dr. P., complete with copies of all the scan pictures and a full description of the diagnosis. If I'm lucky, he will pay more attention in the future and not just tear the letter up and throw it away.

The fear, the panic, the tears - they were in vain but they were real. After Benjamin last year, this was a nightmare. Not only I, but Doug, our families, and our friends were shocked, scared, panicked. As I said, this wasn't a harmless oops. This was a serious mistake that could have had tragic consequences.

Please don't get me wrong. I've had wonderful doctors here in Romania. I had dental work done and it was great. We will still frequent our regular doctors just as we had before this happened.

That said, it is true that the overall prenatal care here sucks big time. I do have a regular Ob-Gyn here and he's never wanted to know my blood pressure, tested my urine for proteine, or watched my weight. No blood tests for toxoplasmosis, rubella, or diabetes. Where in Germany I have a big file with all the available data at the doctor's office and at the hospital, there are no records kept here. And this is not a simple hole-in-the-wall doctor, either.

Yes, there are cultural differences even in medical procedures. In Germany, many more ultrasound scans are performed during pregnancy than in the UK or the US. We also do more amniocentesis tests, and have more frequent routine visits. Not everything that is done in Germany is necessary or obligatory.

However, I've gotten very interested in antenatal, postnatal and maternal health in the last years. In the meantime, I know quite a bit about it, so believe me when I tell you that Romania has some catching up to do. I'm not saying this because I have my own axe to grind. I say this because the future of every nation lies in its mothers and children. It's important to take good care of them.

And yes, I'm stepping off the soap box now, thank you very much.

We're alive, really

It's been a rough time but we came out on the other side, a bit worse for the wear but alive. We had a very nasty shock two weeks back which had me emergency airlifted to a German hospital -- and which subsequently turned out to be a "beginner's mistake" of the Romanian doctor I had been seeing. I might blog about it some day.

Doug was traveling for a week, our nanny got sick and quit - and came back. It was the end of the school year and we just spent some days on the beach at the Black Sea coast, where the boys promptly got sick. The nature of the illness was that first one boy, then the other, coughed himself awake every hour, on the hour, all night long. Eventually the combination of sleeplessness and stress combined with too much sun to make Doug sick, and he ended up in bed with chills and fever, unable to so much as put his socks on.

It's been rough going, as I said, but we're back and we seem to be basically OK and slowly things should get back to normal.

Additions to my secret blogroll

Someday, perhaps, the blogroll at Halfway down the Danube will merge Making Light and Electrolite, adjust the URL for Brad DeLong's semi-daily weblog, and link Tacitus to a "Living With Depression" site. (Hint: the current dosage ain't working, man.) In the meantime, here are two additions to my secret blogroll:

Stay Free! Magazine has a blog, and the editrix, Carrie McLaren, is way cool. If you like weird advertising stuff or my obscure Brooklyn anecdotes, you'll like this.

Totalitarianism Today is Alina Stefanescu's blog: US Supreme Court decisions, Romanian politics, words D.H. Lawrence overused, and a lot of poetry. (No, Bad Mama, I am not obsessed with her photo. OK, maybe a little.)

Maybe there will be some non-Carlos content here in the future! One can hope. But I will be away for a bit, celebrating the Fourth of July in the traditional manner of my people: eating grilled meat and blowing things up. Be well.