I can…
For those of you interested in knowing more about my labour and birth (and I imagine only other mothers would be!), you can find the full story here.
There are some gory details here and there; don’t read it unless you really want to know what labour and childbirth can be like. It’s also quite a long story, but as with my blog posts, I’ve written it more for myself than for anyone else.
Our daughter Ingrid Johanna Toomik Bergheden was born Sunday morning at 3.17, weighing a healthy 3.9 kg.
Everything went well. The worst of the exhaustion has now passed, but we’re all still quite tired and haven’t quite found our footing yet, so further details will have to wait a while.
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| Ingrid Johanna, age 90 minutes |
Walking has become hard work, and now has to be limited to short distances and a very slow pace. I’m not at all used to walking slowly, so the latter actually takes some effort and attention. And when I say slow, I mean really really slow: imagine the pace you would keep if you were very reluctant to arrive wherever you’re going, just moving your feet enough to keep up the appearance of walking forward.
This afternoon I walked to the post box to mail a letter, and then to the local clinic to get a repeat prescription renewed. This should normally have taken about 20 minutes, but took me an hour. I think I walked at half my normal pace, on average, but on my way there I forgot myself and sped up for a moment – and paid for it by getting a stitch in the side (at least that’s what I think it was – with a pregnant belly it felt more like a an agonising cramp in the stomach muscles) and having my blood pressure drop through the floor, so I had to sit and wait 20 minutes at the clinic for it to recover.
Then I got home and slept 2 hours out of exhaustion, waking only once to turn to the other side.
No, walking doesn’t work well now. Cycling, however, still works perfectly well for short distances (did yesterday, at least). With hindsight it’s clear that I should have cycled to the clinic instead of walking.
I’ve been cycling throughout the whole pregnancy, both because I always cycled everywhere before I was pregnant, and because I’ve found it more comfortable and/or convenient than any of the alternatives. It’s definitely less tiring than walking and puts less strain on the back. It’s also more comfortable than sitting on a bus – bus seats give me a backache. Above all, it is far more comfortable than taking a taxi, which is what everyone has been suggesting to me (if it costs more, it must be better?). London streets are so uneven and taxis have such strong suspension that a taxi ride here feels like being on a fairground ride or a large trampoline. At the top of each bounce Blump pushes my stomach up to my throat, and at the end of the bounce s/he lands painfully on some internal organs. Not comfy at all. On the bike I can at least see each bump coming and avoid it or compensate for it, but there’s no way to do that in a taxi.
The bike is not really an option for longer distances any more (too tired afterwards) so I’ve been taking the tube for my daytime bookshopping trips etc. The tube has turned out to be a reasonably good alternative, as long as I’m not in a hurry (which I’m not) and can avoid the rush hour (which I can) – a positive surprise, on the whole.
The high rate of Caesarean sections (one in every five births in the UK and in Sweden; one in three in the US) is probably of more interest to me than to you.
One of the reasons for these high numbers is women’s preferences: half of the Caesareans in the UK are elective. Choosing to undergo major surgery rather than to go through a natural process is an odd choice in my opinion. But I guess those women may have greater faith in modern technology than I do, or be more averse to pain and hard work, or put greater value on convenience. Anyway, that’s not why I’m posting – other women’s reasons for elective Caesareans are relatively irrelevant to me because I’m not even considering that option.
What I find more interesting right now is the other half of Caesarean sections, and why they are performed. It appears that doctors’ inexperience is one major contributing factor: junior doctors are more likely to opt for a Caesarean because they do not have sufficient experience in other assisted methods of childbirth
An article in the New Yorker highlights a related reason: the standardization of childbirth. Teaching all obstetricians to perform one standardized procedure well is easier than teaching them the numerous more “manual” alternatives. And Caesarean section is a standardizable procedure – it is a technical process that doesn’t vary much from patient to patient. Using the forceps, on the other hand, is more of a craft – it requires the doctor to develop a “feel” for using the right amount of force, etc.
The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry? If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.
But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts. You seek reliability.
Whereas before obstetricians learned one technique for a foot dangling out, another for a breech with its arms above its head, yet another for a baby with its head jammed inside the pelvis, all tricky in their own individual ways, now the solution is the same almost regardless of the problem: the C-section. Every obstetrician today is comfortable doing a C-section. The procedure is performed with impressive consistency.
Found via Salon.
My very pregnant looks came up during a lunchtime conversation today. Somehow that then led on to a mention of Homer in his muumuu in “King-size Homer”.
I have to say, this is the first time I’ve ever been compared to Homer, in any context!
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| Helen in muumuu | Homer in muumuu |
We went to an antenatal parent education class today, organised by the Royal London Hospital. I have to say it was a big disappointment.
First problem: it took us 3 tries, on 3 different weekends, to even get to the class. The first time no teacher turned up and we gave up and went home after 15 minutes. The second time no teacher turned up, we chased around the hospital to find out what was going on, were told the class was cancelled because the midwives were all busy, and went home again.
This time a midwife did turn up to actually hold the class. But she was so disorganised, and her way of presenting so confused, that the class was almost useless.
She started by handing out a course plan with a list of topics. That course plan had nothing to do with the actual course. When she spoke, it was almost a stream-of-consciousness presentation: she might be talking about pain relief in labour, in 3 sentences segue into breastfeeding, then moments later be talking about how to raise children, and then back to labour again. Only when someone asked a specific question did she stay on topic for more than a few moments.
Occasionally, when someone asked a question about something I felt informed about (I have been reading, after all) I was very tempted to answer the question myself because then they would at least have gotten a coherent answer. I believe some of the people there may have gone home more confused than they came. Of course, if they knew nothing at all, then this may have been more useful than nothing…
The course was supposed to take 6 hours. 4 hours after we’d started, the midwife obviously thought she had spoken enough and sent us home. Well, she did ask if there was anything more we wanted to hear about. But if we knew what we needed to know then we wouldn’t have been there, would we!
I got the impression that someone had set up this class a while ago – written the course plan with suggested topics in a rational order – and then handed it over to other people to run. Maybe the original plan was put together by a consultant from somewhere, or just a midwife with some planning skills who later left. (The course seemed to be a few years old: many of the printouts and photocopied materials were dated around 2002). In any case, the materials appear to have been taken over and used by random people with no teaching or organisational skills whatsoever.
Maybe the teachers are different on different weekends and we just had bad luck. But the hospital should know that. If the hospital sends someone with so little preparation and so little teaching aptitude to teach a class, they can’t take these classes very seriously. This seemed like a mixture of box-ticking (“each hospital shall provide antenatal classes”) and keeping the parents pacified, rather than an effort to actually provide information or knowledge.
It certainly explains why the antenatal classes by the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) are booked about half a year in advance (which is why we attended this one instead).
I think there might be some truth in those stories about pregnant women feeling tired, after all.
Friday evening after work I had dinner, read some, and then pottered around aimlessly for a while. By 9:30 I was barely able to keep my eyes open so I went to bed and slept 11 hours straight.
Saturday I went to Oxford Street for some shopping. Took the tube instead of cycling to give my body some more rest. When I got home I lay down on the sofa to catch my breath and rest my legs a while. Fell asleep and woke up an hour and a half later.
Thus the relatively low frequency of new posts here recently.
Blump really is a very active little fellow. Even midwives comment on how much s/he moves – every time they try to listen to Blump’s heart, s/he moves away from the heartbeat monitor as soon as they put any pressure on it. And I’ve never had the kind of worries that some pregnant women write about, when they don’t feel the baby move much and wonder if everything is OK.
Standard medical knowledge expects babies to settle in one position (normally head down) around week 32. I am now coming to the end of week 33, and Blump definitely hasn’t done that yet. It feels like a minor earthquake when Blump turns around from one position to another. It’s hard to imagine two arms and two legs making all that movement! Sometimes s/he sneakily turns around during the night – twice during the past week I’ve woken up to find Blump apparently lying horizontally, with his/her feet kicking out towards one side and the head pointing towards the other side, which was a pretty odd feeling!
With all this moving around, I’ve become curious to understand where and how s/he is lying, and learned to more or less “map out” Blump’s body.
First of all there’s the kicking, of course. Kicks are strong and distinct; arm movements feel smaller and lighter. Where I feel most movement, that’s probably where the legs are. Hiccups – regular “ticking” movements – should probably come from the top half of the baby’s torso, I imagine.
In addition to feeling movements, I can figure out Blump’s position by feeling around the belly. (One of the midwives explained briefly what she feels for, and the rest is just practice and common sense.) It doesn’t work every time, but it is getting easier and clearer as time goes – in part probably because I get more practice, but also because Blump fills up more of the belly.
I find it’s easiest to map out Blump’s position when I lie on my back with my knees bent, so the water flows down towards my spine and leaves Blump more exposed. The parts towards the top half of the belly are easiest to feel – above where my waist used to be, up towards the ribs. I try to feel what’s up there, and assume that the parts I haven’t located are lying down below the waist.
Every body part on its own may be hard to spot, but if I can kind of guess a few of them, the various clues reinforce or clarify each other, until I get a reasonably clear picture of what’s in there.
Right now, for example, Blump seems to be lying with the head down, the torso towards the left, and legs & feet up underneath my right ribs.
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