Healthy Development: The World Bank Strategy for Health, Nutrition, and Population Results Book

The very savvy marketing people make sure to note conspicuously on the cover that this book was written by doctors who are also parents. And you know what? That's a pretty useful thing to know. I'm not one of those people who believe that "one mom's simple trick to losing a belly" is automatically a smart diet plan or that a schoolteacher is likely to invent a cold prevention drug that the pharmaceutical companies couldn't. I prefer to leave my medicine to people who have actually been trained and practice it, thank you. But at the same time, there's a huge emotional component to pregnancy, and knowing the authors went through this themselves is actually reassuring.

And it's a good reflection of the book--this is an excellent balance between solid medical information (it tracks well with information I've obtained from other sources, including other books and websites as well as anecdotally) and reassurances that these things are normal, this too shall pass, and what is and isn't a legitimate concern.

I'd heard a lot of horror stories about the venerable What to Expect When You're Expecting, enough to scare me off. I worry too much already, I don't need to be given a good dose of hypochondria on top. I was relieved to find that the Mayo Clinic, while blunt, is not particularly prone to scare-mongering. There are the endless lists of symptoms, of course--pregnancy involves some truly horrifying symptoms, even the relatively benign ones, that go way beyond the stereotypical craving pickles thing. And they don't want you to freak out and think you're abnormal and going to die when your feet change size or your eyes stop focusing or various parts of your anatomy abruptly change color. But they're very soothing about it all--they explain how likely various things are to happen, why they happen, what it means, what to do about it, and when to actually consider it a problem. Oh, and for most of the symptoms, assure you it's temporary and tell you when it's going to go away.

I think the part that finally really won me was the chapter on serious complications. Which they flat out tell you at the beginning of the chapter not to read unless you actually develop one of the conditions, because they're all extremely unlikely and reading this would just freak you out.

Like most of the rest so far, I took their advice.

And how has that been going for me? Pretty well so far. They've been mostly right, and following along with the pictures and week-by-week explanations is fun. There are some minor disagreements between the book and my doctor, so I'm taking the most conservative advice. And they missed one really big symptom for me, but it's apparently relatively rare except within a certain subset of people. Since the reason What to Expect has gotten so bloated and scary is that they try to include every possibility, no matter how unlikely, I can't complain too much about them not mentioning something that's benign, untreatable, and only affects people who have previously broken their tailbones. (Turns out, that comes back to haunt you. Curse you, sixth-grade me!)

Check back next year, I suppose, but so far so good.