I didn't know that I would get pregnant that fast...one month and a positive test! I believed that it would take us six months and that I would have plenty of time to analyze my birth options (home birth, birthing center or hospital).However, I got pushed in a certain direction by my gynecologist and I found myself in the childbirth hospital system. I would be very curious to know how it works where you live but in Montreal 1) 25% of women don't have a doctor during their first trimester 2) there is a dramatic shortage of ob/gyn 3) there are only two birthing centers 4) home birth...well home birth was never a realistic option for me.
I have nothing against home birth. In a perfect world, I would love to give birth at home but you have to understand that I have a tendency to think that with my medical history (and the list could be much longer believe me!) I would have to get rushed to the hospital anyway!
So long story short, I went to "my" hospital for the fist time today. Every month, I see my ob/gyn at a cute family clinic but for my 4th echography they asked me to go to the "sick people house"!!! Yeah, this afternoon, I really wished that I had called a birthing center while I was peeing on the pregnancy test last summer!!! But what is done is done and I will give birth at the hospital...end of the story.
But this doesn't really matter to me right now because I know that, so far, we have a healthy baby with all the right bits in all the right places :)
And as our disappointed friend said on our way back home: "it HAS to be a girl, boys don't cross their legs"!
3 comments:
So here (Michigan) there are plenty of ob/gyn's in bigger cities. Most of the deliveries are at hospitals and a few do deliver at home via midwife. I would rather be at a major hospital as you have access to higher level care if needed. And trust me, from experience, pregnancy can change in a moment. For me, delivering at 28 weeks, I was very thankful to have the tenth largest NICU in the country available to me. Even not knowing the outcome at the time, I would have still wanted to deliver at a hospital and would have hoped for a c-section.
Living in Ireland at the moment, all I can say is that I desperately wish I was in the UK. You'd think that for a country renowned for having large families, there would be more facilities for pregnant women but in my opinion, it's really pretty neolithic. There was never any hope for me to have a home birth (medical history and lack of midwives) so I had three options: public, semi-private or private. Public is free but you get treated as though you're in a cattle market, semi-private is around €900 and the only difference seems to be that you get to see the same consultant at each check-up (and even that doesn't work when the consultant has to get extra help in because he's too busy) and private seems to be pretty much the same as semi-private but it costs about €4500. We took semi-private but in the end we'll all end up in the same delivery room and no private room after the birth. There are about 14 doulas in the entire country (and they cost too much for us) and the Irish version of the National Childbirth Trust (which is really switched on in the UK and has it's own midwives) is pretty much just a website here providing only basic information.
Consultants attitudes seem to be pretty backward at times too. A friend of mine showed her birth plan to her consultant and he just laughed and said "you'll do what I tell you". So far mine has been more open minded but I'm not holding my breath.
I wouldn't recommend having a baby in this country to anyone!
My two were born in a hospital - to be honest, once labour really kicked in, I probably wouldn't have cared where I was. I was jealous of my friend who got to have home births free on the NHS, but that wouldn't have been an option for me, anyway. I wasn't even allowed a midwife delivery for my first, as I had had some funny test results, the likes of which they had never seen (baby was fine, my case is now in the medical books).
But boys do cross their legs - both of mine refused to cooperate for their first ultrasounds and I ended up with one of each...
Post a Comment