It’s hard to know where to start. But since a lot of things I want to talk about are directly affected by the fact that I had an OB and hospital birth with my first baby and a midwife and birth center birth with my second, I think this a good place to start.
Part 1: Pregnancy Care With An OBGYN
You schedule your appointment early in the morning, so you’re not super late to work. First appointment of the day, 9am. Walk in 10 minutes early, get signed in and pee in that stupid cup. 9am rolls around. Then 9:10, 9:15, 9:20. You’re starting to wonder if they forgot about you. Finally, 45 minutes past your scheduled appointment time, they call you in. You get weighed and led to a room. Where you wait some more. The doctor finally comes strolling in an entire hour past your appointment time.
Sound familiar? I swear this happened to me every fucking appointment. It pissed me off every time. Zero respect for time. Also, why do they make you pee in that stupid cup every time? I looked it up once, and there is some reason, but it wasn’t memorable because I don’t remember why anymore. I remember thinking it was ridiculous though.
After waiting nearly an hour every time, my doctor would come in, ask how I was feeling and if I had any questions. Now here’s the thing that I know now. You don’t know what you don’t know. If I didn’t have any questions, which I often didn’t, then he should have been giving me information about what to expect, things to look out for, things that help with this symptom or that one, etc. But no. I got none of that. Looking back, I never got the feeling that this guy cared one bit about how I was really doing or had any intention of educating me on my options. He knew how “his” pregnancies and births went and that was that. I’ve come to learn since then that he was not unique; this is in fact a common theme with OBs.
Appointments With the OBGYN
Being first time parents, we were excited to get quick ultrasounds at nearly every appointment in the early weeks. We later learned that this wasn’t normal. I think this guy just liked to bill for all the ultrasounds he did, so thanks for that doc. It was fun to see our little bean grow week to week. We would chat briefly about how I was feeling, and then the appointment would be over. Some weeks, my visit with the doctor was only 5 minutes. Which made that hour long wait even more infuriating.
During one of my 30-something week appointments, I brought in the birth plan I had drafted up to go over with my doctor. This was one of the few appointments that my husband wasn’t able to come with me. Unfortunate. My doctor looked over my birth plan and chuckled. He said – HE ACTUALLY SAID – “things are going to go how they’re going to go” essentially explaining to me that my birth plan was useless, because really, it was going to go how HE wanted it to go. I had written down that I wanted intermittent monitoring, because I wanted to be able to walk around while I was in labor. He said “that’s not happening” even though I knew from research that I had done that constant monitoring really wasn’t necessary. He actually pulled out a pen and crossed things out that he said weren’t going to happen. I cried in my car after I left that appointment. I really should have looked for a different OB at this point, but I was mere weeks away from having the baby, so my husband and I felt like we were stuck with this guy. So we just hoped that maybe that was a crappy appointment and the actual birth day would be just fine. But more on my birth stories later, when I dive into hospital vs birth center.
Overall, my pregnancy care with the OB was ok, but really surface level. He didn’t educate us about anything and constantly left us feeling like we were missing out on something, but weren’t sure what exactly.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Pregnancy Care With A Midwife