More than anything, what might push me to have a home birth for my next child was how awful I thought recovering in the hospital was.
About the only thing I liked about the hospital was the 24 hour service. Want a snack at 2 am? Push the button. Baby do something weird? Push the button. Run out of something? Push the button. The button is great. But no one explained to me where the button was. I figured it out, but the first time I wanted to push the button I couldn't find it and wondered around my room searching for it and ended up pushing a button on the wall. It worked, but I thought it was a very inconvenient place to have the button.
Basically a bunch of little things went wrong and a bunch of little annoying thing were said to me that the accumulative experience of being in the hospital made me not want to go back.
But there were times during my pregnancy when I found myself crying to my husband telling him I didn't want to go to the hospital. "I'll just stay at home! I can't go there!" One was when I was talking to my midwife about how people were asking if they knew when the baby was coming and how I would say, "You really have to give yourself a three week buffer on either side of the due date." My midwife said, "actually it's two weeks." And in my pregnant mind I thought, "NO! They are going to induce me for no reason if I go over due and something is going to go wrong! I'm out of here! I'm finding a new birth place! They can't make me go to the hospital!"
The next time was when I asked my midwife exactly what happens when you go to give birth with the midwives at the hospital. She explained it all. Which was good. There were no surprises. But it freaked me out. This is basically what got through to me, "you have to labor in bed for 20 WHOLE minutes hooked up to a monitor. Then we're going to use the doppler up to every five minutes on you to monitor the baby." For whatever reason all this monitoring freaked the hell out of me and again I thought, "Nope! Not going to do this! Going somewhere else! Finding a home birth midwife now!"
I'm sensitive to begin with, you see.
So here I am holding my 30 minute-old baby. And the nurse says something about pitocin helping to prevent hemorrhaging, can I jab you with a needle full of it. And I agree. And now my thigh hurts. But I have no arms available to help me deal with this hurting thigh. So I say, "rub me where they gave me the shot, rub me where they gave me the shot. Rub me where they gave me the shot!" Eventually my husband, who was just as bleary-eyed and out of it as me at this point thinks to rub my thigh. When you are holding a 30-minute-old baby, the room is not empty. But no one seemed to listen to me and I didn't know anyone's name.
Then there was the bed. I didn't know anything was wrong with my hospital bed until sometime during labor when I wanted to lower the whole bed down and it wouldn't go down. It was broken. Then about 5 different nurses said the exact same thing, "Hmm... your bed is really high up. Do you want to lower it?" Then I would explain that it was broken and wouldn't go down. And then nothing happened. I assumed that this was the bed I was stuck with. It made things hard during recovery because I really had to hoist myself into the bed, and my table didn't fit over the bed that was so high, so I had to eat leaning over the side of my bed to reach the table. Then the morning we were supposed to be discharged yet another nurse came in and said, "hmm... your bed is really high up, do you want to lower it?" And I again told her it was broken. And she said, "Oh we can get you a new bed." To which I said something like, "a what?! I can get a new one and I've been dealing with this broken one for nearly three days now!" "Oh yeah, that's no problem."
I fucking kid you not, a new bed was there in less than an hour. I was so pissed.
And there was the time a nurse came in, took my vitals and left and then about 30 minutes later another nurse came in and said, "Uh... let's see... uh... I think it's time to take your vitals now." I didn't give me the best feeling about my quality of care. And there was the nurse who was totally unsupportive of my breastfeeding difficulties.
And for God sake. I don't care if the birth is over. Read the birth plan! Birth plan includes vital things like: "we are not going to circumcise," "Andrea will be rooming with the baby for the whole stay," "no E-myacin in the eyes," "no Hep B shot." I was asked three times if we were going to circumcise. I was asked quite a few times if I wanted the baby to go to the nursery for a bit. And had two separate pediatricians insist on getting the eye goop put in his eyes. Skipping the Hep B everyone seemed to think was cool. I was so annoyed because I had written the birth plan and given it to my midwife who looked it over and approved it and signed it and put a copy in my file and they referenced it when I go to the hospital. This seemed to be an important document. Then all of a sudden it was like, "you had a plan? What?"
So all of the above things were relatively minor and maybe I would have forgiven them if it weren't for the one that broke the camel's back.
First of all imagine you have this tiny 8 pound being you are suddenly responsible for and you've never had one before. It's an overwhelming time to begin with. Pediatrician Dyad One enters when he is just a few hours old. It's a 30-something male with a very kind demeanor and a younger woman he is teaching; HCMC is a teaching hospital. Baby looks great! They say. Er... except he's a *little* jaundiced. They order a biliruben test which they assure me is pain free.
Many hours pass.
Suddenly I think to ask about it. I tell a nurse, "hey, they were supposed to do some jaundice test on my baby, but it hasn't been done and that was like 10 hours ago." "Oh I can do it." She says and starts to wheel my baby out of the room. I immediately start to sob and tell me husband to follow the baby. Baby cannot be more than a few feet away from me or I freak out. Brent follows and the baby comes back. It is evening now and we go to bed. Err... as much as you can with a baby who is 18 hours old.
The next day the PKU test is done and baby screams. But it should be all the blood work they need. Then Pediatrician Dyad Two enters and they look at his record and they look worried. They talk to a nurse and say that our baby's biliruben test was high enough to need a blood test done. And why wasn't this done? The nurse says she had no idea. I lose it now. I sob. I sob and sob and sob and sob. My baby has a problem and it was ignored and I have never felt more vulnerable in my life and I am scared. I am so upset that Pediatrician Dyad One actually comes back to personally do the blood draw for my baby, so that no nurses get in the way this time.
But my tension doesn't ease up and I find myself sobbing and telling them about all the other little things that went wrong.
Eventually I got to talk to the head of the Midwives at HCMC and complain to her. She apologizes, but I'm already pissed.
Our baby ended up not having too bad of a jaundice after all. He was fine. But it was scary anyway.
So that is why I am very hesitant to go back to a hospital to deliver a baby.
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