Response to a comment
Agatha wrote a comment which I felt I should respond to.
- Gestational diabetes is a "diagnosis waiting for a disease" so it’s lovely to hear someone else agree! I love reading Michel Odent’s views on this subject.
- GBS screening is a 36wk screen for group B step and it is POINTLESS - I’ve blogged on this before, but you can hunt around for some more information on the interwebs too.
- I commented that many women attend lots (10+) of appointments during pregnancy, and I should probably explain that I’d rather quantity over quality. If the midwife knows the woman and the woman knows the midwife and doesn’t just feel that she is presenting to be ticked off as attending her appointment, and that the care was personalised and one-to-one and continuous, it’d be a different story. I dislike attending appointments, as a student, where the woman walks in, is kind of talked at rather than listened to, has her blood pressure checked and fundus measured then patted on the head and sent on her way. What is the point of this? If there’s no dialogue about *why* these things are done, is the full potential of these appointments realised? I think not, but I may be wrong having never been pregnant myself.
- Ultrasounds bother me because I’m not entirely convinced that they’re harmless. Women do love them but when you see the fetus curl up and away from the probe, and react to it, you have to wonder how much harm is being done by this and how much benefit there is. It also goes back into the "we’re just reassuring women that Nothing is Wrong, rather than being able to prove that Everything is Ok". Those two things are actually quite separate and different.
- CTG monitoring in general annoys me - not evidence based and not always monitored closely, and usually means the woman is in bed.
- Delivery rubs me the wrong way because it is such a clinical term when used in the context of c-sections and you deliver pizzas, not babies. It’s the whole connotation of someone else giving a baby unto the mother, rather than the woman doing the work. I had to think long and hard about why that bothers me so much Agatha and I appreciate the poke to do so! I use the word "birth" myself, because that’s what it is, and given the name of my blog you can probably guess that "catch" is a term that I use and I have used around me quite a lot. Tastes in words change, and "catch" is more in vogue these days with the people I learn from, but this may vary around the world. It also does describe more of what I do - I coach and support and guide and in the end have a babe slip into my hands, safely, before being handed on to the parents (not always - I’m a fan of encouraging mums and dads to catch their own babes!!).
- Clocks in the room mean people watch them slavishly. Delivery rooms here have windows and natural light - I can’t imagine working in a room without some kind of outside light during the day!
- The 38wk due date thing annoys me because I see a lot of women spend 3-4 weeks upset that their babe is "late" and scared because of that!!
- The baby size guessing game - if you are experienced in palpating babies and guessing their size based on that (I’ve seen a midwife who can do this and be within 50g of the birthweight!) then yay. But when women get an ultrasound that has a 15% margin of error either way, this annoys me because they obsess with the upper limit and are then unable to hear anything I might say about pelvises and breathing babes out.
- I find it interesting that you think birth is unnatural as soon as a woman enters hospital. I will have to ponder more on that.
- The woman being at the correct height is really important OH&S-wise - I damaged my pelvis/back last year and need to be very careful with it even now, so I use the bed to my advantage (yay also for being 5′5" tall!!). But there are ways of doing it that are degrading still and these are what I’m talking about.
