(K___ wrote the preceeding post and told me it was waiting in draft format while I was three quarters done on this one. I hope you'll forgive the duplication and that there's some interesting stuff in this too.)
For the second of our ante-natal classes last night, we visited the maternity unit at Southend Hospital.
As you will know, we had long decided we wanted the baby born at home, but it is possible that if something happened in the intervening weeks, K___ might be told she has to go in, so it was worth getting aquainted with it all.
We arrived in the entrance to the maternity wing just before 7.30 to find a few other couples from our previous class already there. We stood about making a few comments, but no one is quite friends yet and we were all relieved when the midwives arrived and split us into two groups for the tour.
The first room we saw was the one which K___ would be most likely to be admitted should it be necessary. It was a very functional room with various bits of equipment around the walls such as resussitation devices and the pain relief stuff. It was cold-looking, clinical and decidely unfriendly. Hanging from the ceiling on a multi-pose arm at the far end of the endlessly configurable electric-powered bed was a light. "It looks like a dentist's light," said one mother to be, and indeed it did. "Open wide!" replied the midwife. I'm inclined to think she was genuinely being guilless and only meant to ape a dentist but I couldn't help a very different image entering my head. Not somewhere to look forward to.
The next room we saw was quite different. It was set up to look like a home from home. It had a normal bed in it with a Victoriana-style metal bedstead and quilted top cover upon it. There were pictures on the wall and an easy chair in one corner. Opposite was a high-walled bath above which spun a lazy, early Pink Floyd-inspired oil projection and soft music played, though that wasn't particularly acid tinged. Rather amusingly (for K___ and me only I expect), it turned out to be the radio and the next track began with a staccatto picked intro that we recognised. Appropriately it was the Snow Patrol track that Living TV has used extensively (too extensively) over its trailers for Season 2 of Grey's Anatomy and I couldn't help but imagine Dr Addison Montgomery was about to walk in to deliver one of the mums. There was also a birthing stool in the room and D____, the midwife accompanying us, was demonstrating how you sat when you gave birth.
Then she demonstrated the pool. How far up the water would come. The position that most women find is most comfortable. Someone asked whether women stay in the pool to deliver the placenta. I keep meaning to write about the placenta from last week's class, so won't go into too much detail here, but suffice it to say that some women do give birth to the placenta in the pool, but they don't especially encourage it. D____ then mentioned about the blood during birth. A little, she said, was okay. As long as they could still see the bottom of this four by four foot pool, they weren't too concerned, but if there was a bit more... At this point, the entire room became aware of the bloke I mentioned last week who I thought seemed a little squeemish. No doubts about it. All the good stuff about blood and gore had made the poor chap go an unusual shade of puce and his hand was hovering over his mouth. Fortunately, D____ noticed his distress and knocked it on the head at that point. However, you've got to wonder how he's going to cope with the real thing if the mere mention of the crimson stuff brings him to the point of chutney juggling...
More in the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment