Milk Matters (or what happens when a pregnant woman has too much time on her hands)

(This happened about two weeks ago.)

I did it almost everyday. I bought some cream cheese, bread, and half a liter of milk to take as a snack at around 9 am. They only sell "haltbare Milch" (the kind in sold at room temperature in tetrapacks and last several months), and I only drink chocolate milk, so that's what I bought. I started reading the daily company newsletter on my computer, put the straw into the tetrapack, and took a sip of milk.

Hmmm, it tasted a little funny. I figured I had forgotten to shake the carton before starting to drink, so I shook it carefully, turned the straw a few times to try to mix the chocolate and the milk better, and took a small sip again. Tasted awful.

I don't know what a normal pregnant woman would have done. Perhaps just throw away the carton (since the snack shop was already closed) and then continue on with her day. But to an absolutely bored pregnant woman who still had to stay 8 more hours at work with close to nothing to do, this was an invitation for trouble.

I started out by reading about milk on Wikipedia. Here's what it says under "Milk > Spoilage": "Pasteurized cow's milk, on the other hand, spoils in a way that makes it unsuitable for consumption. This causes it to assume an unpleasant odor and pose a high danger of food poisoning if ingested." (Yellow warning light goes off in brain.)

Uh-oh. Hmmm ... Now to find out what happens when a pregnant woman gets food poisoning ... Wikipedia says: "... foodborne illness can result in permanent health problems or even death, especially in babies, pregnant women (and their fetuses), ..." (Yellow warning light now replaced by 10 large, bright red "DANGER" lights accompanied by loud honking.)

Almost every page I looked at in the internet which had "food poisoning" and "pregnancy" and "fetus" in the same sentence also had "death" in it, and therefore set off more panic lights in my head. Time to call the husband.

He tried to calm me down, telling me "But you only drank two tiny sips!" to which I said "It doesn't matter how much I drank, we don't know how many awful germs were in those two sips!" At some point I snapped; "You don't believe me! The baby might DIE!" Well, what else could he have said to THAT! He promised to call the doctor immediately.

The doctor told him that if I don't have any symptoms in the next two days, then I and the baby are fine. TWO DAYS! I insisted on taking the carton of spoiled milk home and keeping it the next two days, just in case they had to do tests to find out just what awful germs were in there.

Ok, I had no symptoms (although my husband insists I started complaining about every twitch in my body), and the baby was perfectly fine during our ultrasound test a week later. And from the moment we knew that the baby was ok, my husband has laughed at that story. At least until we told one of our friends --- a mother of twins --- whom we both regard as being one tough lady. SHE didn't laugh (well, maybe she smiled a little), said she was exactly the same when she was pregnant, and went on to tell a funny story about a cat, an apple, and toxoplasmosis.

(Note: If you are pregnant and have no pet cats anyway, I suggest you don't start reading now about toxoplasmosis and what it does to fetuses. Otherwise you may start carrying around a gun to shoot at every cat and cat owner that comes within 10 meters of you.)