I know, I know I’ve been a bit slack with reporting back on this class, but give me a break I haven’t been too well.
It was a good but long class and you know whenever a group of people get together there is always one that is out spoken and has the “whole world revolves around me syndrome”…you know the ones. This group is no different what is worse is that there is not just one but two of these people present.
Within this group I have not mentioned my infertility woes, to me it is not important to share with them my experiences. I don’t feel the need to ‘justify’ why my pregnancy is more special. My family here in Australia and in Hungary know how special this pregnancy is, I don’t feel the need for strangers to give me additional sympathy. Plus I don’t know their stories either and it is not the point of these classes.
One particular ‘support partner’, who is a female helping her sister, felt the need to share with us that she is already a mother to twins conceived through IVF. Great, good on her yes IVF can work for some. However having to hear explicit details on her birth is again not the point of these classes, it is obvious that she feels the need to contribute and perhaps even scare some of us. One brave soul spoke up and told her that we didn’t need to hear about her catheter incidences during her birth. We were there to learn about different types of pain relief available.
The IVF mother of twins sister asked all sort of graphical questions relating to tearing. At one stage it got just too much and I ended up saying that after glimpsing some of the other ladies cringing at the idea of 2nd and 3rd degree tears “that some of us would like to be ignorant of these things and not have to know everything about it all”. The midwife did step in and suggested that she would be more than happy to discuss all her questions after the class.
To be honest I’m not looking forward to the next two sessions, as these two ladies have ruined the experience for me. It starts off great but ends up being a 2 women show, and we never seem to cover what the midwife has planned and we go over time.
Ok, there were some things that I did learn that I never knew before…pethidine is used as a pain relief. I only previously knew of the gas and epidural. What Tim and I were surprised to learn about is that if you have pethidine then your baby must be given an additional injection ‘like they do drug addicts’ to counter the effects.
I also didn’t know that when you have an epidural you must also have a catheter inserted (hence the whole catheter incident discussion). The thought of a catheter put me off the whole epidural suggestion as I’ve seen them being put in before…not nice at all.
There were pro’s and con’s for each pain relief intervention and now for me it is just a matter of thinking what I would like to have during the birth. I’m not keen on writing a birth plan as to me birth is so unknown how can you plan for it? But I will be discussing with Tim my preferred approach to the birth and pain relief.
Today right now I’m not keen on the pethidine the con’s out way the pro’s for me.
1 comment:
When I was studying Midwifery I was told to strongly encourage clients to write a birth plan, and that it could be anything between a paragraph and 4 pages long. The idea was to be able to clearly communicate between staff what the wishes of the patient were if she were otherwise incapacitated. They're also good to clear up discrepincies between what you expect to happen and what the staff expect.
For example, you may ask that they clean the baby before handing them to you, or for the baby to be 'caught' by your husband. You may want to include that your husband will stay with the baby in the event that they have to go to be checked out if all isn't 100%, or that you want hubby to stay with you, but you'd like a nurse to stay with your baby until one of you can be there.
Writing it is also a good way to make sure that both you and your husband have the same expectations as you want to clear up any disagreements as soon as possible, rather than still be debating Daddy cutting the cord as the baby crowns.
Anyway, I'm sorry about those horrible people in your class and that you haven't been feeling too well. I just thought I'd share what I was told in case someone else hasn't told you that yet. But by all means, if you don't want to do a birthplan, just don't. Your baby will arrive no matter what, birth plan or no birth plan.
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