I don’t think anyone can be expected to think up a clever response on the spur of the moment when you are tired, vulnerable, and your supposed caregiver utters the most ridiculous or rude comment you never could have imagined. That said, it’s hard not to wish someone who IS that clever would verbally smack the jerk upside the head.

He is lucky though that he said that to me before they let my husband in because there definitely would have been some fireworks then.

I also had a very bad experience once when I was hospitalized for DVT. (I was 12 weeks pregnant at the time, but none of the staff I dealt with were in obstetrics until I threw a hissy fit and the end of my stay and got moved to maternity.) I had to deal with a nurse bringing me the wrong medication and then insisting I take it, a doctor flat out lying to me and then refusing to come back and see me to clarify, several different nurses who were supposed to be monitoring the baby and didn’t even REALIZE that they were doing it wrong and writing MY heart rate on the chart (hence my hissy fit), the hospital administrator I called to my room so I could lodge a complaint trying to threaten me into just going along, and more.

My grandmother was bullied by a cardiac surgeon into consenting to an operation that, in the outcome, killed her. The doctor knew my mother would have told my grandmother not to do it because of the possible complications (stroke, for one) and so the doctor came to my grandmother’s room at ten o’clock at night and badgered her until she signed the consent form. He didn’t tell her the possible complications. He didn’t tell her that of the last eight people he’d done this procedure on, seven had died.

Doctors in many specialties do this. Some fail to understand that just because they went to medical school and can form an opinion that it doesn’t invalidate the opinions of the people who have hired them to protect their health.

So you have a woman who’s physically vulnerable and then you throw in the emotional blackmail of “you want what’s best for your BABY,don’t you?” with the implication that you’re a bad mother if you decide something different from the doctor or the hospital, plus a hospital that has instituted procedures for its own benefit and lawyers who have instituted different procedures for their benefit, and nurses who are slinging nonsense at first-time moms who don’t have the knowledge yet to counter them.

Plus, when you encounter a doctor who’s especially patronizing, you’re not going to be able to change his mind.I walked into my first postpartum visit with three books about NFP and lactational amenorrhea, and when I started asking questions the doctor couldn’t answer, he brushed me off with “You’ll be pregnant in six weeks.” So I changed practices, changed insurances, and got away from that doctor.

So faced with a scenario in which you’re vulnerable and you know it won’t do any good to protest, most people probably don’t. But we leave the practice and we talk to other mothers, and at the end of the day, overcoming attitudes like this makes us stronger, more convicted mothers who are better-armed to take on other people when we aren’t vulnerable and when it will help.