Maternity leave, a birthday and odds and ends

Today is my first day of maternity leave. It is also my 37th birthday.

It is strange how one can feel exactly five years old in some ways and yet older than 100 in many others…

I intend spending the day grocery shopping, directing Anton, the gardener that helps us once a week, to get rid of the glaringly obvious bugweed in the bottom part of the garden (Anton suffers from a strange affliction called bugweedmyopia which renders him incapable of distinguishing this weed from other plants and I really don’t want to be fined for having this plant in my garden), meeting my friend Patricia for lunch and seeing Dr Juby – the very nice GP who has been the children’s doctor – together with Dirk to try and sort out a birth plan. She has agreed to assist in the event of a c-section.

I’ve promised Marco no more going to work and even though there are many many things still left to be sorted out at work, it is also abundantly clear that my General Manager does not seem to give a damn. Despite phonecalls and an e-mail requesting a meeting, I have had no response from her whatsoever. I understand that she’s busy, but one meeting in a year is probably not too much to ask, is it? So, late yesterday afternoon, I dropped off some submissions and my leave form, gave the key to one of the more responsible architects and left.

Next week I’ll have to go back to see the guy doing our scanning project. We had around 52 000 drawings on microfilm and the reader as well as the database program have failed dismally. So, as my luck would have it, they are now almost in the middle of the project of digitising the data and indexing it. The people doing the indexing, though experienced, are not librarians and the material is very difficult to index, so I need to look at the database that they are busy creating to sort out any problems before they have to redo all 52 000 records.

Dirk agreed to go and see the ward manager at the hospital to discuss my birth plan. We looked through it last night and we tried to be clear on what is necessary and what is negotiable.

For instance, I don’t like the idea of having a heplock in place, but I understand that in the case of an emergency my blood pressure can drop dramatically, rendering them incapable of finding an open vein. So, I’ll forgo that one.

I don’t want continuous monitoring purely because I’ll have to be stationary and maybe even lying down for that. And that is simply begging for stalled labour and even a baby in distress. Periodic monitoring and paying attention to all possible signs of rupture is quite likely going to be more than adequate.

Similarly the standard used for dilation is the Friedman curve. Not only is this standard about 100 years old, but recent research has suggested that the way it was set in place and calculated was inferior to the methods used today. There is evidence that women generally dilate in a somewhat different pattern compared to the Friedman curve. And that is accepting that all women dilate the same way – which anybody with the ability to think logically would tell you is impossible. I wish I had a penny for every birth story I’ve ever heard with a person who dilated slowly for hours and then progressed to complete within seconds. There is no way I’ll let them dictate the course of labour or any intervention to me on the basis of an obsolete standard.

I’m not generally hungry during labour, but I am going to eat something easily digestible if I’m in need of sustenance.

And my baby is not going to leave my arms unless it is truly in need of medical care. I don’t care how they do it. I’ve had Marco – despite the fact that we were both fine – taken from me and obviously Loren too. The thought of it happening again just makes my heart ache.

All the above is of course why a homebirth is so infinitely more appealing and safer.

But today I’ll also start phoning around for a doula. If she could be a qualified midwife just going in with me as a labour support person, I’d be even happier. Considering that the last time I was left to almost bleed to death and had my records fudged too. The trick is finding the right person with the limited choice I have. There is only one homebirth/private midwife here, but even though I like her a lot, she was the one helping me at Marco’s birth and when we transferred to hospital I felt completely abandoned. I understand that she was on their turf and needed their goodwill to continue using their hospital, but it’s not a comforting thought either way. I will phone people in Durban and ask if they are prepared to travel. The two cities are only 45 minutes from each other, in any case. I’m sure that it takes longer to get to some of their clients within Durban – traffic considered – than travelling to Pietermaritzburg straight on the highway.