So I went to the doctor this morning. I’m really not enthused with this doctor – I chose her because she was just up the road from home, and female, because I was due a smear test at the time, and I kept her because I’m never sick so I don’t need to see her often. And it’s not that she’s bad, it’s just that she seems flaky and uninterested in me. This morning, for instance, she never called me by my name or gave any indication that she’d looked over my chart from last time, when I’d mentioned about trying to get pregnant later in the year.
Anyway, the point was merely to get a recommendation for an OB, and in case she had anything important to tell me. It says on the pregnancy test box that if you’re pregnant you should see your doctor asap, so I was just being responsible. The most I got from her in the way of advice was “Eat healthy food and not too many fatty things.” Duh. She couldn’t even tell me whether to start taking prenatal vitamins or extra iron or anything – she said to keep taking the one-a-days I’m taking now and see what the OB says when I see them in two weeks.
And she drifted in and out of the room talking to me in between dispensing medecine to an old deaf Mexican lady whose husband didn’t seem to have much English. And then charged me $25 for the privilege. Thanks a bunch: I could have just got your OB recommendations over the phone and made my own appointment, but I mistakenly thought you might have something useful to tell me. I suppose I now know that my blood pressure’s okay, and that I’m half an inch taller than I thought I was (yay 5 foot 4 and a half).
Anyway. Gah. The most gah-ish thing is that I tried to ask her about how “interventionist” these OBs are – having read the scarily informative Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth , I think I’d like to try minimal intervention until the pain gets too awful and I scream for the epidural. I certainly want to find an OB who won’t automatically hook me up to internal monitors and give me an episiotomy (slit from your guggle to your zatch, as I always think of it) and numb me from the first contraction and leave me labouring on a bed for hours. Or decide to induce me because I’m late according to his (or her) counting or because she (or he) wants to go on vacation. So I gingerly mentioned words like “birthing center” and “midwives” and “lactation consultants” and the doctor told me dismissively that such things were developed as “low-cost options” in this area – as if they were only for poor people with no insurance who couldn’t afford real hospitals. She’s an older lady, and I fear she’s from the generation who thinks the more high-tech your birth can be, the better.
I’m not a big crunchy granola hippie, I’m really not. But I do want to know about my options and I don’t want to be railroaded into doing this the way every one else does just because they’re a veritable baby factory down here. This is our baby, and it’s the first one we’ve made, and it’s special.
Anyway, the possibly good news is that I thought of a better source to ask for information. I’ve been hearing about doulas since I started reading the baby threads, and they sound like a wonderful invention. A doula is employed by the expectant couple to act as the mother’s advocate during the birth. She knows all about the process and isn’t as emotionally invested as the father or some other person would be, so she adds to the help and leaves them free to comfort and not have to panic about what they should be doing. There’s a registry of doulas and I looked it up for this area. There are none right here (quelle surprise) but there is one in the town about an hour and a half away. So I mailed her and explained my situation and asked if she could give me any recommendations or information about my options in this area or nearby. And that, if she works this far away, we might quite possibly want to employ her too. I don’t think she’d be covered by our insurance, but by all accounts it’s really worth it.
So we’ll see if she gets back to me.
