Читать книгу Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth - Emma Mahony - Страница 11

When you go into hospital – a place that will always bring up some anxiety of being ill or visiting sick relatives – you do so as an intruder. As a woman you are not ill, just pregnant, but as you sit in the waiting room as one of many, you may begin to experience new pinpricks of fear that weren’t there before. In the ultrasound department, this fear may be coaxed out by giant posters on the wall showing photographs of your baby in utero looking like a visitor from outer space. Other posters will carry information about how you could already be harming your baby by smoking or drinking. In the waiting room there will be more posters of mothers cradling a newborn with a headline telling you Why Breast Is Best or another showing a baby sucking on a bottle of sugar, warning of the perils of giving juice in a bottle. The hospital atmosphere itself might make you start thinking new thoughts: ‘Will this baby be all right?’ or ‘Why do they want me to take a blood and urine test? Does everyone have these, or can they see that I am a bit thinner/fatter/taller/smaller than the woman next to me?’

Sometimes, talking to a doctor can be more confusing than enlightening, as strange words are used, as if you were already in the know: ‘We are measuring the nuchal fold,’ says the radiographer. ‘We are looking for protein in the urine,’ says the midwife, as if you had some understanding of its significance. The use of language like this builds a barrier between you and the people with the stethoscopes round their necks, and often you feel a little more helpless and a little more ignorant than before you went in.

Of course the picture I am painting may be far worse than in your corner of the country. Here in London every hospital antenatal appointment is double-booked, so you can wait over two hours for your precious five minutes with the consultant. Even in those five minutes, if you have a medical student present the doctor may not be addressing you but teaching while talking.