The Woman In Cabin 10: Book Review

In what I would consider to be one of the most bone chilling thrillers that I have read in 2016, I immediately recommend that you go to Amazon and put this in your cart for payday. You’re welcome. Make sure to buy the hardback–it’s only a dollar more than the Kindle version, and you will want to share it with a friend when you’re finished!

The entire book reads with a constant humming of danger and “whodunit” to keep your normally manageable daily anxiety on an entirely new level of HIGH.

Honestly I didn’t go into this novel with a whole lot of confidence. I had just finished a few romance novels and wasn’t even in the mood to read any type of thrilling fiction. Never mind the fact that the last few thrillers I had read left me a bit high and dry–and I wasn’t a  cult fan of Ruth Ware’s first book, In a Dark, Dark Wood.

First you are going to meet Lo Blacklock, who’s a journalist with a naturally inquisitive mind. Lo writes for a travel and lifestyle magazine which leads her to be be a passenger aboard the Aurora Borealis. Covering the maiden voyage of the ship is the break of a lifetime for Lo. Even before Lo boards the ship we get the sense that she a very nervous human being. She seems shaken–stating that she can’t sleep, think, or forget the man who broke into her apartment the few days before boarding the ship. Girl, I get it–I wouldn’t sleep for weeks either. (That’s why we have a dog, and a security system!)

Lo meets the woman in cabin 10 with the most awkward exchange of,

“Sorry, I know this sounds really weird, but I wondered if I could borrow some mascara?”

Lo gets some mascara from her new pal and remains determined to not let her previous experience at home deter her from kicking some major tail and making this opportunity work for her. Then we read this…

… there was a splash.
Not a small splash.
No, this was a big splash.
The kind of splash made by a body hitting water.

Twenty Four Questions We Asked Our Midwife at Twenty Four Weeks: Pregnancy

At the OBGYN practice where I’m getting my prenatal care, there is a major team dynamic. Several doctors intermingle and treat/deliver prenatal care alongside two nurse midwifes. When you become a prenatal patient you are rotated through a monthly scheduling device of meeting every doctor at least once, as well as each midwife. For someone with anxiety, I loved this plan–I would at least have a fifteen minute experience with each of these humans who may be on call when baby Virginia is born!

Being a first time pregnancy, I have been constantly writing down questions about natural childbirth or topics that I wanted to discuss with my medical caregivers. However, almost all of them seemed like questions I really wanted to wait to ask the midwife, who I assumed would give us a straight forward answer.

So armed with my two pages (literally) of questions and topics I was curious about, Matt and I went for our appointment with THE midwife that literally everyone who goes to the practice adores. Even my friends that were not interested in natural birth said they wanted her to deliver their babies. I felt like I’d waited the entire MD rotation for this moment.

I’m an anxious planner, and I figured having a lot of these questions that floated through my head early on answered would be ideal. That way, if I knew I really wanted a water birth but it wasn’t possible–I could adapt my way of thinking over the next few months instead of having major anxiety surrounding it the day of.

So the midwife came in, I told her I had a ton of questions, and she sat with us for almost an hour making sure that we had every single answer. She was amazing. I literally am thinking of naming our second baby after her, because she is THAT cool. She also told us everything terribly honestly, which is what we wanted. She didn’t tell us what we “wanted” to hear–she told us her truth.

 

Here’s the list:What does a “typical” natural labor and birth look like in this hospital?

Why We Are Planning For A Natural Childbirth: Musing

Allow me to preface this by saying that I know many wonderful, damn near perfect mothers that had medicated births. Personally, my mother had two c-sections because she wasn’t a good VBAC candidate and we were both flipped all the wrong ways. Some of my best friends have the most perfect children ever–smart, kind, funny, and ahead on all of their milestones…and they had medicated childbirth. I know of people who schedule their c-section at week 20, and that’s what works for them. This is not meant to “mommy shame” anyone, or make anyone feel like less of a badass for how they brought their child(ren) into this world. Because really, just creating another life makes us all pretty extraordinary, doesn’t it?

“Natural childbirth? As in you aren’t going to get an epidural?”

“No, I’m not going to get any drugs if I have my way.”

“You say that because you haven’t had any kids yet. You’ll be begging for it by hour four.”

To say that people have had some interesting reactions when I tell them that we are training and prepping for a natural childbirth would be a massive understatement. After conversations quite similar in nature to the one listed above, I’m almost always met with the question of “But….Why?”

So here’s my “But…Why?”