My sentiments exactly. Once I got over my laughing fit.

Precisely! I about fell out of my chair laughing, then when I sobered up I just shook my head at the the stupidity.

I have no way to improve on this.

If she needs the heating pad for back labor, then no epidural because the epidural would have obliterated the pain.

lol i know how that is, they refused to let me take my own tums at the hospital the other day. I got stuck taking their nasty chalky gross antacids instead of my yummy smooth dissolve tums.

What are they gonna do, take away your twinkle lights?? Next baby I have, I’m taking my own ibuprofen. WATCH ME TAKE IT nurse lady!

I think the Drs and hospitals need to be more concerned with the off label uses of Pitocin for augmentation of labor, and Cytotec for induction (since it’s basically illegal to use meds off label and with good reason… cytotec ruptures uteruses and kills moms and babies and Pit leads to c-section and maternal and fetal complications and death). I think they have a little more to be concerning themselves over then a rouge heating pad. Yes there needs to be tort reform so that drs don’t need to worry about dangerous heating pads and their pain relieving mayhem but COME ON! It’s a freaking heating pad!

That’s just it. The maternity care in America (and other places) is full of nothing but cover-your-ass policies. And doctors who actually care about the patients and don’t practice the CYA policies get kicked out of their hospitals.

I know a woman in Turkey who got sectioned. She spent a YEAR drafting a letter to her OB because she felt it was unnecessary. When she finally sat down with her OB, the OB admitted that the section was unnecessary. The only reason it was done was because of insurance. They wouldn’t pay if the woman wasn’t sectioned in X ammount of time; as it is, they gave the OB a hard time about paying because they thought she waited too long to section the woman. She took the time to sit down with her OB and point out everything that had made her feel inadequate and/or scared, and on almost everything the OB agreed about. A friend of hers has since delivered with said OB and had a completely different experience for the better.

Plain and simple, hospital policy SUCKS for the laboring mother. They take away your clothes and put you in uncomfortable/undignified hospital gowns, put an IV in you which straps you here, put belts around your middle which straps you there, lay you on your back (which is uncomfortable for you and tends to hinder the labor/delivery process) because it’s convenient to shove their hands in your hole whenever they want and it’s convenient to catch when you’re ready, and they put you on the Almighty Clock. If you have met critera X by time C, they put you on pit, rupture your membranes, force you to push when you are not ready to push, and won’t let you eat or drink (sometimes for more than 24 hours). And if you haven’t delivered a baby by the time Clock reaches zero, you’re cut open. All in the name of cover-your-ass policy. They laugh at you and wear you down anytime you want to do something that doesn’t fit with their views of birth (such as walking, or hiring a doula). For most OBs out there, your birth means NOTHING to them. It’s all about how much money they can suck out of your insurance company and making sure their own ass is covered.

There’s protection and there’s common sense. If I bring my own labor materials to the hospital, then I’m responsible for the use of those. If the hospital wants the mom to use only an approved heating pad for back labor, then the hospital should provide heating pads.

Wouldn’t any laboring mom ask the nurse for it first before asking her parents to go buy one? If the hospital isn’t providing approved items, particularly normal items like heating pads, then it should be fine for the patient to bring her own.

Wow… Jessica… where is all your hate coming from… a heating pad… I don’t hate Dr.’s and I’m not Anti-Hospital… what I am is pro the re-humanization of birth, and for womens choices and bodies being respected… and well for informed consent… and doctors separating their personal opinion from facts to gain that consent… seriously where is your hateful sentiment coming from… we are here to shine light on the plight of maternity care in the States, where Doctors aren’t making decisions anymore, its malpractice insurance companies that are dictating protocol that has nothing to do with the overall well-being of mothers and babies, but their own bottom line…

That “defensive medicine” approach brought on by fear of lawsuits is one of the reasons so many of us hate going to obstetricians for anything other than a true emergency to begin with.

I practice defensive birthing by staying at home.

Where I can use my own heating pad if I feel like it.

P.S. This was long before I got the epidural.

Thanks for sharing, Eve. Would you like to share the rest of your birth story? Did you get the birth you hoped for?

What an idiot. I’m sorry you had to put up with him for your L&D. That’s one of my pet peeves is how most women don’t even get to deliver with the doctor they had their prental appointments with. I think I’d flip out.

Wow, you managed to birth your baby anyway, in spite of him?

That’s strength.

Two points for you.

LOL!

All appliances have to be checked for safety compliance and so on, huh?

Well, phooey. That means no twinkle lights, I guess.

Policies on appliances clearly vary from hospital to hospital, as the hospital where I delivered my baby had no policy like this. When I asked them if they had any opinion about my TENS unit, for instance, their reaction was more along the lines of “Why would we care?” They left me and my appliances to our own devices.

These rules do not exist in a vacuum. Clearly somebody burned themselves or electrocuted themselves at some point. Not every patient is as upstanding as we are. Did I ever tell you about my roommate whose husband was sneaking beer into our room for her and all the while she was demanding more pain meds after a vag delivery? Meanwhle, I’m recovering from a c-section and breastfeeding with them waltzing past and bellowing at the top of their lungs. I hated her.

Your locker sounds like my purse.

Thea, I don’t think Sarah was trying to “push buttons” w/that last comment. The way I’m reading her comment is that she is trying to be funny about the ever-present twinkle-light jokes. Just MHO, but I think she was trying to be funny…..and trying to show she is understanding and maybe agreeing w/you. Just my two cents….not that two cents is worth much anymore!

I got beat plenty as a child. It’s why I decided to research other parenting styles and decided on attachment parenting as found in the books of Dr William Sears. I don’t see my parents as appropriate role models.

Tangent…

I don’t think anyone’s figured that out yet. I get varying images in my head ranging from a string of white christmas lights that twinkle on and off to those fiber-optic lamps.

I think the jury is still out on the exact nature of twinkle lights, but somewhere in the archives is a now infamous quote from a doctor (vastly paraphrasing) along the lines of “you can’t have a water birth, intermittent EFM, birth ball, or push in any position you want, but it doesn’t matter because we have twinkle lights!”

Watch it, Thea, or I might show up in labour and ask for you as my nurse.

Here’s the quote on twinkle lights. http://myobsaidwhat.com/2010/03/31/but-ill-let-have-twinkle-lights/
Just for fun, I like to picture twinkle lights as kind of a laser light show with Pink Floyd playing The Wall in the background. Maybe some mood fog along with it. Perfect atmosphere for birthing.

Young! You called me young! Oh, my. At my age, that really is flattery. Thank you.

My threatening to sic my labouring self on you was pretty much tongue in cheek. As I’ve mentioned a couple of other times, I am the patient from hell. We definitely have differing philosophies of what constitutes “necessary involvement” in birth, on the part of the medical professionals, and what does not, but you’re a lot more open-minded than most of the labour nurses that I’ve talked to (certainly more open-minded than the kind that get roasted on this board when they say something appalling), and more importantly, you do have a patient’s best interests at heart rather than convenience or routine.

It would mean getting the full, um, benefit of medical micromanagement, but the only thing that would get me into a hospital maternity ward would be a genuine emergency like a placental abruption or a cord prolapse or something, and if that was happening, I’d actually want the whole medical shebang, and I’d rather have a nurse like you than a nurse who deserved to put up with the likes of me as punishment for her sins.

BTW, my one-hour labours are probably the result of idiosyncratic oxytocin release. I’m autistic. A few years ago, I read an article in the local paper about how autistic people and people with social anxiety disorders don’t have a slow, steady trickle of oxytocin like most people do – when we release it all, it’s usually in a huge flood, followed by another long period of not releasing any, and that, the scientists speculated, might be why we are often socially maladroit, phobic, uninterested, etc, and part of why we have sensory hypersensitivities. I’ve noticed that when I’m breastfeeding, while I make enough milk to feed sextuplets, I have almost no let-down and have to press down on my mammaries to start the milk flowing at all. And when it does come in, it comes in about once every half hour and so strongly that it feels like the teat fairy is inflating me with a bicycle pump. My husband saw me grow two bra sizes in a few seconds. My first two labours were kind of like that too, in that I only noticed contractions every half hour, although in the second instance, after a couple of hours of that it was more like every couple of minutes, and because it fit the pattern of my gastroenteritis, it didn’t occur to me that it was actually labour.

Anyway, I mention this because if you get a person on your ward who you got a heads-up to the effect of her being on the autistic spectrum (we constitute about one percent of the population, according to current estimates) and she’s not “progressing,” it might be that she was admitted to early and her oxytocin flood hasn’t kicked in, never mind what her cervix says. When the flood comes, labour will pick up… fast. Also, after she’s given birth, given our weird hormonal release pattern, it might be a good idea to hook her up with a lactation consultant ASAP to help out with the breastfeeding. I didn’t need coaching, but I could have used a warning that my milk might come in really hard and fast when it came in, and that it would probably hurt until I got used to it. It isn’t exactly pleasant to feel like one’s boobs are being inflated by a bicycle pump. A little preparation would have prepared me better, mentally.

If there is a Chicken Soup book that focuses on natural childbirth, please, give me a heads up! So far, the only writing I’ve actually been PAID for was a mediocre poem about Sir William Wallace. I’d like to use my English degrees for *something*.

There are a couple of collections of positive birth stories out there if you ever have time to read through them (after ploughing through the long list of interesting stuff I gave you to read earlier)

Tree of Life – Diane Gregg
Journey Into Motherhood – Sheri Menelli

Thea,

I read about the use of a TENS unit during labor in one of my pregnancy/birth books (Sears & Sears, I think). Since we already own one, I figured I’d try it. I had some horrible back labor, and the TENS unit really did help. It didn’t miraculously make the pain go away, mind you, but it definitely helped. I’d say it’s worth a shot.