midwife's muse

Birthday Boy

Yesterday was Jack's 3rd birthday party, a noisy affair with children of various ages taking it in turns to laugh, cry and fall over. It was a dinosaur themed event as they are Jack's current passion, he is able to name most dinosaurs accurately and does not hesitate to correct anyone who gets their diplodocus muddled up with their brachiosaurus. The anniversary of his birth must have set his Mummy thinking because she just phoned me up and asked if I had 'blogged' about Jack and Izzy's births and if I had could I send her copies as she was feeling very hazy about them. I logged on and checked that Jack's was still there, that it hadn't been erased during the changeover, and there it was. I started reading it to her and, like the big soppy that I am, started being all tearful when I reached the point he was entering the world, talk about emotional women!

Pregnant daughter et al. are, at this moment, flying out to Spain for a weeks holiday with the in-laws. She is viewing this their last chance at a 'normal' break for at least a year, she is anticipating the birth of Van and Lorry, the twins, with trepidation. What was lovely at the party yesterday was that all both daughter's friends are on standby to assist both before and after the identicals arrival and they were swapping phone numbers so that they can liase with one another. Hopefully a robust support network will see her through any difficult times to come.

Heaven only knows what is happening to the maternity services in this area, it is mainly trifling things but there are many irritants that I feel really shocked as I discover one hiccup after another. We mainly book women for 2 different maternity units here, both the same Trust but almost entirely different paperwork. The week before last one unit ran out of scan request forms, not the end of the world but something that makes a simple request for a scan appointment more difficult as the ultrasonographers want a proper carbon-copy form. Luckily I was at that unit with daughter last week so the 2 scans I wished to book could be requested by me photocopying the one blank form they had as a master. Not too stressful but it means driving a total of 30 miles just to book a scan, not really cost-effective so something I wouldn't normally do. Then I hit upon the plan of sending them scan forms from the other hospital in the Trust, yes thats fine but they have to be in duplicate and we don't have a photocopying machine so you have to fill in 2 scan forms, tedious but a way of solving a problem until...........the other hospital runs out of scan forms, yes that has happened. Methinks the Trust might be trying to save money by stopping the scanning service. Apprently the forms have been on order for 6 weeks now, someone needs to put a boot up the backside of the suppliers and I'm first in the queue. Then I heard about another local unit that had 17 births in one day, and that 16, 16 of them had been by caesarian section, that is absolutely horrendous, that's like a statistic you would hear from Brazil. I have applied for my hospital parking permit, which I have to pay for even though I cannot do my job without my car and if I have to park in a car-park whilst I'm working I can claim the money back, Anyway, there is an 18 month waiting list for a permit!! I have been warned I will be clamped if I don't 'pay and display', well b******s to you jobs worths, clamp me, that should make interesting reading in the local press if a hospital representative makes it impossible for me to do my job. SFB.

22.4.07 17:43