I'm such a nerd!

Studying.....that's what I should be doing right now but hey a girls got to blog! I'm such a dork though and love school so I guess the only reason I'm blogging is to really gush about my excitement with this semester! In my APA Writing for Psychology class (sounds boring and it is except for the research aspect of it) we have to choose a topic of interest in the field of psychology and research it. Naturally I chose anxiety levels in NICU families because I'm very interested in how some people deal with the situation one way and another parent will do the complete opposite. For my second topic at the end of the semester I am going to change it a little and research infertility and the grief response after failed attempts at fertility treatments like IVF, IUIs, etc.

We have to find five studies and one review on the subject and I'm finding it hard to only include five! I think you know you have the right research topic when you aren't bored to tears when you read up on it. I'm finding so many things that ring true and others where I'm like what the heck....they should have measured it this way instead because I for one know that is not true. For example, one study that I have read suggests that there is no difference in anxiety in relation to the babies gestational age. I call bullcrap on that one! Then they went on to say that length of hospital stay was a significant factor. My personal feelings aside on the subject.... its just a fact that for the majority of cases those that are micropreemies have longer NICU stays. So there is a relation to anxiety levels and gestational age. So really thats quite the contridiction.

Then after I got all hyped up on that I get to the methods part of the study and ummm yeah....they didn't take any mothers with infants below 34 weeks....that explains a lot! THEN they say that for women that were on antepartum care or that had issues with their pregnancy where their life was also in danger (like pre-e) it wasn't a significant factor on anxiety levels.....ummm what? So your saying a person that not only had to worry about their baby's life but also their own didn't have higher anxiety levels? Ummm bull crap and I wasn't even in that group and can admit that my anxiety level would have been through the roof if I had to add that on top of all my other worries. THIS is why you take into account more than one study. Oye!

I did LOVE this quote from one of the studies though!

"When a mother fears not for her own life but for her child’s, she is

anxious about the destruction of herself. Her existence is so wrapped

up in her relationship to her child, her existence merges so much into

their being together, that breaking this relationship would be tantamount

to destroying her existence." (Boss, 1994)

This was my first time holding her (well we'll just say that since the first time I didn't have a camera...but I'm sure we looked somewhat like this except I was bawling). What you can see is me holding her looking at her affectionately. What you don't see is that I'm scared crapless so I have the nurse pretty much hanging onto me in the back just in case she stopped breathing. I'm pretty sure there was a decent amount of cortisol running through my body to say the least.