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Matt LumpkinEthics of Life and DeathDr. Erin Dufault-HunterMarch 19, 2009"Welcome"Alternative Project ReflectionOn the day my wife's leg turned blue I was terrified. Her blood had clotted in her femoralvein causing her right leg to swell to twice it's normal size. We were living in Indonesia and noone could give us a straight answer on what was happening or what we should do. We flew toSingapore and there we learned that she had a genetic pre-disposition to clotting (Factor VLeiden) that made traditional forms of hormonal birth control extremely dangerous to her. Wewere also informed that if she were to become pregnant then she would likely suffer another clotputting her and the baby's life in great danger. Five months later, positive pregnancy test inhand, we sat on the bed crying. We had already decided before that, were she to get pregnant wewould move back home. The next day we scrambled to find a blood thinning medicine toreplace the coumadin (which is the same chemical compound as rat poison) because, we weretold, it was likely to cause serious birth defects. One of our doctors suggested we considerterminating the pregnancy. We were both 23 years old.Two weeks later we had moved back to our home state of Arkansas and I begansearching for jobs that would offer medical benefits that did not exclude pre-existing conditions.It took three months, but in the mean time we had begun seeing residents and med students at theUniversity hospital, paid for by state health insurance. Residents demanded we switch medicinesbecause they
had never heard 
of the daily injections of a heparin drug called "Fraxiparine" I hadbeen giving my wife since we had stopped the coumadin. Yet none could explain why.Different specialists painted vastly different pictures of risk and means of managing them. Wehad come back to the US for better health-care only to find ourselves lost in a system that seemed
 
engineered to frustrate, oppress and neglect us. On top of the culture shock of re-entry, thecognitive dissonance was bewildering.Out of this experience came intense frustration, ambivalence, fear and a sense that mywife and my baby's lives were in the cold grip of a pseudo-scientific medicine that was beyondmy control or influence and yet was the best hope we had at surviving. One afternoon I took allof that and put it into the small rectangular piece at the center of this work. The syringessurrounding the child are the hundreds of dollars of medicine wasted at the whim of the system.Every day, medicine demanded that I stab towards my child, aiming for the tissue between mywife's skin and hers, counter-intuitively, to keep them both safe. I embedded the image of thechild within a matrix of analysis and circuitry, representing the way I "science" intruding into myfamily and robbing me of authority and control. That first work represented all the dread I feltduring that first pregnancy. It is dark and is rarely on display. People just don't want to see that.This year began with news that a new baby was growing inside my wife's womb.Though we were surprised at the speed with which we had a new life developing, it was notunexpected news. Though we had held off on getting pregnant since my daughter had been born(healthy, whole and happy) due to risk, fear and expense (the heparin drug, Lovenox, is stillnecessary and costs about $15 per day), we had decided to try again. My initial response thoughwas to fall back into my old habits of fear and dread from the last pregnancy. Yet we are in avery different place this time. Embedded within close relationships with our Fuller communityand our church community, we are not moving half-way around the world into uncertainty.There is still risk and stress, but there is something powerfully transformative about the presenceof such community for us walking back into the experience of pregnancy. On a pragmatic level,we have help with childcare when I need to run out to the pharmacy and buy medicine. But Ialso have fellow fathers to talk to who are also thinking through what it will mean to add a babyto the mix of school, work, church and family. We have a doula in our small-group at church
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