“If you were doing your job as the doctor,we wouldn’t have to be asking all these questions, now, would we?”

Sometimes I wonder what a doctor thinks his job is. I think of the doctor as the gateway to the procedures and medications I will occasionally need to safeguard my health. And some doctors think of themselves as superheroes in whose aura health and wholeness naturally happen.

How incredibly disrespectful. I hope they found another OB.
As far as the question of what the OBs job actually is, I have always thought their job SHOULD BE as facilitator and the giver of advice, but they seem to think their job is a dictator, which is quite telling as to their psychological issues.

It’s scary to wonder what sort of questions could possibly “hinder” him from doing his job.

Ooh this is one issue that just gets my goat. I don’t respond well to the whole “Be a good little (girl/patient/sweetie) and do as I say.”

I’m not 4, and I’d like to get information so when I sign “informed consent” papers, I actually am informed.

Sorry, doc, I have no job in this relationship. WE hired YOU. If anything, it’s my job to make the best decisions for myself and my baby, and that means getting information.

Now you do your job and be a good doctor!

“Then let me do my job as a woman!”

What is a good patient? Does it make somebody not a good patient if they want to know ahead of time what a procedure is? Just asking questions doesn’t make one a bad patient. (again, I dispise the word patient refering to normal pregnant women)

If my doctor didn’t even want to answer basic questions, (s)he’d be fired in an instant. I hope this mother wasn’t already in labor at this point and this was a pre-natal discussion.

Good patient = sheep. *GAG*

At least he showed his hand in this one! And hopefully she switched.
Ladies, you can switch all the way up until the baby comes out. I have one friend who switched in her ninth month, and another who switched while already in labor – to another hospital.
Her doc had pretended to be on board for her VBAC and promised no intervention, etc, and when she got to the hospital her totally changed his tune.
She walked out of there to the chorus of the ‘dead baby’ song.
Her first baby was a C-section with this doc because her water broke prematurely. He didn’t have the shot of steroids to help speed up the development of the baby’s lungs before the section, and instead of waiting a bit or transferring to any of the other gazillion hospitals in the area, he did an ‘emergency section’ at 30 weeks in his hospital with only a Tier One NICU and the baby died. And he was blaming her for not wanting another go with him!
She was NOT a good patient this time.
But then, good patient does not always equal healthy baby.

Okay, this exact same thing actually happened to me while I was PUSHING!! I had mechonium with my 2nd, and because I had been in labor for 21 hours, and had had clear fluid for over 12, as I was crowning I said, “As long as his lungs are clear, please place him directly on my chest, and please don’t clamp his cord until it stops pulsating, and I’d like to deliver the placenta naturally.”

Unfortunatly my CNM was out of town for Thanksgiving when I delivered, so everything we had discussed had to be discussed with the dr on call *grrrr*, and since this was the first time I had seen her the entire time (yes, as I was crowning) this was when we needed to discuss it. She looked at me and said, “Will you stop trying to control every aspect of this birth!?!”

Now granted, I had been very *demanding* wanting to walk around during my labor, wanting to eat, wanting to shower since they wouldn’t let me use the tub we had rented and brought with us (“because your water broke, it’s unsanitary”), wanting to use every method known to me and my doula to jump start contractions without pit, not allowing them to give me iv fluids, etc.

When his head was delivered and she had suctioned him and said it didn’t look there was any mechonium in left, or in his mouth, I quickly pushed out his shoulders and grabbed him myself, before she could! That may be why she completely ignored me and clamped his cord immediately and looks so pissed at me in the pictures. I was not about to let her tell ME that I couldn’t have my baby!