This is National Unassisted Homebirth Week!
I think ;o) at least my calendar says so. (the one I made, so it must be true!) Alas, I find no mention of it on-line and can’t remember where I heard it. If you can find something corroborating will you please let me know? In the meantime, I’m still recovering from my daughter’s 4th birthday and the capes and hooded towels and mermaid tails and waldorf-y crowns that I made in a fit of ‘o my goodness, my baby is a kid’ creative angst. I’ll post photos soon. Oh how time marches on…
It just dawned on me that the corporate-friendly hospital comics are perfect for unassisted homebirth week! cool!
xox,
Heather
rish80 said,
July 2, 2008 @ 4:52 am
Ooh I found it somewhere!
http://www.worksmartlivesmart.com/pages/page_37.asp
Julinda said,
July 2, 2008 @ 5:09 am
So true about the IVs! But it’s not just by IV that mystery meds are given. I had 2 induced hospital births, and the first one was induced by placing a little pill on my cervix. I did not know what the little pill was. Several years later I started reading about a drug called Cytotec (misoprostol) that was used to induce labor and that could cause very serious (life-threatening for mother and baby) complications. Remembering the way my labor went, I wondered if Cytotec was the little pill they used. When I was pregnant again, I asked the doctor and sure enough it was. She apparently still used the drug in inducing labor, but since I questioned it, she did not use it to induce my second labor. Moral of the story is, no matter where or how you give birth, educate yourself. And don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. If I’d been more educated and confident, my first labor would NOT have been induced, and the second one might not have been.
wiffersnapper said,
July 2, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
I’m another one who had an IV and had no clue what went into it… I didn’t find out that I was given Pitocin with my first birth until a year later, when I got a copy of my records to try and figure out what had happened. (It was not a pleasant experience!) I was apparently given Pitocin after delivering naturally, even though it is also noted that I managed to get rid of the placenta all on my own. I can’t imagine why they thought I needed it, and no one asked me about it in advance.
It is WAY too easy for medical personnel to put things into the IV of a laboring woman, whose attention is (by necessity) focused elsewhere.