Zatera Ul

I’d been meaning to take a tour of the maternity care section of my first-choice hospital (the hospital I will go to if I have to go to one for the birth). We ended up taking an extended tour of it this weekend–I had a pain in my side, plus I was throwing up a lot, and our midwife recommended that we go to the emergency room. The ER sent us up to Maternity, where they could do fetal monitoring and see how the baby was doing. After a bunch of tests, and getting ultrasounded to death, they decided I had an UTI, and wanted to keep me overnight. So we spent the night in an LDR room. They gave me an IV, because I was dehydrated, and that helped a lot. The baby was just fine, bouncing off the walls as usual. We have some ultrasound pictures now.

My hospital stay only confirmed my reasons for wanting a home birth. First of all, the hospital bed was horribly uncomfortable, for all its adjustability. I should have kicked MFH off his fold-out chair, and slept on that; I was way behind on sleep before I even got there. Secondly, most things happen faster at home–if I want something, I can either get it myself, or ask MFH. In the hospital, nurses are busy, and tired, and sometimes forgetful, let alone all the time they must be spending on paperwork and shift changes. Yesterday, we spent most of the day just waiting for the doctors to get around to us and say that I could go home, and for the wheels of the bureaucracy to turn. The waiting was exhausting, especially since all I wanted was to get home to my own bed and take a nap. (MFH thought that the people in the room across from us had managed to arrive, have their baby, and go home in less time than we were there, but it turned out he was wrong.) There wasn’t much to do in the meantime except watch the Food Network (we don’t have cable at home)–with MFH taking notes on recipes. Privacy was another issue–most of the people who came into the room didn’t close the door on the way out. I got up a couple of times with my IV to close it, when MFH was out fetching pillows and things for staying overnight.

We came out of it agreeing that staying in the hospital was like going camping: you have to bring what you need, and to be prepared for discomfort and inconvenience.