Looking up!

To follow up on Friday’s post about doctors, I had a what-on-earth moment with a doctor last week at my regular checkup.

I posted previously about having grown an inch in between two pregnancies. This is pretty well documented. I was five feet two and a half inches from about the time I was eighteen. At some point after the birth of Kiddo#2, my brother-in-law was razzing my sister-in-law about being short. I said, “Hey, watch it — I’m shorter than she is!”

“You are not!” he said, so SIL and I stood back to back, and I was a little taller. I said, “I thought you were five-three.” Yeah, she is.

At the DMV, they took my height and had me at five three and a half. I said, “You gave me an inch,” and the guy said, “Take it,” and like any good government employee he didn’t go back and correct what he’d written.

So the next time I was at the doctor’s office, I asked to be measured, and I was indeed five three and a half. The only thing I could figure was that I’d responded to the baby’s growth hormones during pregnancy.

I do know of other women who grew taller after pregnancy, so it’s got to be possible. And for once, I had data.

I was standing in a different doctor’s office last week, two pregnancies later, and guess what? Five feet five inches.

Assuming I was measured correctly, that means I picked up three quarters of an inch each while pregnant with Kiddo#3 and Kiddo#4. I laughed out loud, and the nurse dutifully recorded her number.

Later, I said to the doctor, “I grew another inch at age thirty-nine.”

She said, “That’s impossible.”

Impossible.

What does she expect me to believe? That a half-dozen doctors and midwives and DMV employees consistently measured me incorrectly for the first thirty-eight years of my life, always shorting me of my rightful five feet five inches and always by the same amounts, and then these unrelated strangers gradually (and in concert) altered the amount by which they shorted me in order to create the perception of growth? And that my sister-in-law was the mastermind of the whole charade, slouching in order to create the impression that I’d grown?

But I didn’t fight the doctor. What’s the point? It’s not as if her disbelief is going to shrink me again.