I don't like doctors. It's not because it hurts when I get a shot, or when they stick something in one of my orifices. It's because I don't like doctors.
Let me start again. I like doctors who can fix tangible problems: a broken arm, an artery that has come loose, acne, varicose veins, cataracts, open heart surgery, c-section births, vag births... you know, things that can actually be fixed. (I love saying vag birth because I know it's on the verge of being naughty, yet still a medical term)
Today we went to our second pediatrician. We fired our first pediatrician for bad bedside manner and being ESL. I know that sounds slightly racist, but when it's your kid, and there is a question of whether she's going to be healthy, you want someone explaining things to you in your mother tongue.
I can understand if you travelled pregnant in say, Nepal, and had a baby there. You would accept broken English while hearing your baby's diagnosis (or hearing it through an interpreter). Children's Hospital in Vancouver is a different story. I think it was more a combination of ESL and this doctor talking at us like we weren't really there. I can imagine her in med school learning to talk to parents using neoprene "parent" dolls to explain a baby's ailments to.
This is also the doctor who scooped Olivia from us on her second night, and sent her to the nursery to sleep in an incubator with the other incubator babies. Of course, I'm not complaining about sending her to the nursery. It was in Olivia's best interest, (I think). The explanation went something like this: "Mom and dad must know that baby's blood sugar is low, and the nurses down in the nursery are very good at bottle feeding, yeah? So baby is going to nursery for awhile. Good-bye. Oh, and don't forget to buy Nestle's Good Start Baby Formula". After we figured out it was Jennifer (mom!), and Bill (dad!), and Olivia (baby!), we were crushed to have to walk with our new baby downstairs to the nursery to watch them shove a feeding tube down her nose into her stomache (yes she cried, and so did we), and then leave her there hooked up to monitoring equipment.
I can understand if you travelled pregnant in say, Nepal, and had a baby there. You would accept broken English while hearing your baby's diagnosis (or hearing it through an interpreter). Children's Hospital in Vancouver is a different story. I think it was more a combination of ESL and this doctor talking at us like we weren't really there. I can imagine her in med school learning to talk to parents using neoprene "parent" dolls to explain a baby's ailments to.
This is also the doctor who scooped Olivia from us on her second night, and sent her to the nursery to sleep in an incubator with the other incubator babies. Of course, I'm not complaining about sending her to the nursery. It was in Olivia's best interest, (I think). The explanation went something like this: "Mom and dad must know that baby's blood sugar is low, and the nurses down in the nursery are very good at bottle feeding, yeah? So baby is going to nursery for awhile. Good-bye. Oh, and don't forget to buy Nestle's Good Start Baby Formula". After we figured out it was Jennifer (mom!), and Bill (dad!), and Olivia (baby!), we were crushed to have to walk with our new baby downstairs to the nursery to watch them shove a feeding tube down her nose into her stomache (yes she cried, and so did we), and then leave her there hooked up to monitoring equipment.
The next morning (4 hours later), there was no tube in her nose. "She pulled it out", said one of the nurses. (way to go Olivia!). And they never put it back in because she was feeding well from a bottle. So, Jennifer and I fed her from a bottle for two days in the nursery. Couldn't they have just taught us how to feed her from a bottle and let us keep her? We are still feeding her. Now she's bi: breast and bottle. She is a very talented little girl. Why didn't they just teach us to bottle feed her in the first place? You get long silences from the health establishments when you ask such questions.
Doctors and nurses love machines. It's just like Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life. Even if you don't like Monty Python, just watch the first 15 minutes of this movie. It's hilarious. So Olivia is in the nursery hooked up to a machine that goes "ping" (you'll get this if you watch the movie), and then... the machine goes... PING!
What!? As a parent, your heart drops, and you start looking around. She looks fine, but there are wires hooked up to her feet and chest, and at the other end is a machine that is setting off an alarm. No nurse comes running over, they still keep doing what they are doing in other parts of the nursery looking completely relaxed. I'm looking around, and finally, someone just yells over, "is she pink?" (referring to her skin). "Yes!" I say. "Then just hit the reset button". After this happened a dozen times, I was conditioned to look at Olivia to see if she was pink, then push the reset button to stop the beeping. Couldn't we have just kept her out of the nursery, watched to see if she was pink, and fed her from a bottle?
We have fired other medical professionals during Jennifer's pregnancy with Olivia. We fired the midwife. Actually we fired all the midwives at the midwife clinic. We also fired the prenatal doctors at Women's Hospital. We ended up with one fabulous obstetrician: Debra Millar, instead.
What!? As a parent, your heart drops, and you start looking around. She looks fine, but there are wires hooked up to her feet and chest, and at the other end is a machine that is setting off an alarm. No nurse comes running over, they still keep doing what they are doing in other parts of the nursery looking completely relaxed. I'm looking around, and finally, someone just yells over, "is she pink?" (referring to her skin). "Yes!" I say. "Then just hit the reset button". After this happened a dozen times, I was conditioned to look at Olivia to see if she was pink, then push the reset button to stop the beeping. Couldn't we have just kept her out of the nursery, watched to see if she was pink, and fed her from a bottle?
We have fired other medical professionals during Jennifer's pregnancy with Olivia. We fired the midwife. Actually we fired all the midwives at the midwife clinic. We also fired the prenatal doctors at Women's Hospital. We ended up with one fabulous obstetrician: Debra Millar, instead.
Why all this firing? I believe it's our right to ask for proper care. As parents, we don't know what proper medical care is in the moment, but we can figure out pretty fast if things are making sense. I hate to compare this to how George Bush runs his country (it makes us look bad as parents), but its similar. George really doesn't know how to properly look after those people down there in the U.S.A.: it's too complicated. Experts show him all the options, and he picks the best one. The difference between he and us is that we care about the end result. We don't have just 4 more years of parenting (or six more months as of today - HURRAY!).
Who in the medical community came up with the term "false positive?". False positive was the result of Jennifer's triple screen pregnancy test back in December. From that day forward, we knew we were in trouble.
What if I used that term in my work? If I hit a wrong note, or played a song in a wrong key while accompanying a jazz singer, could I get away with it by saying: "yes, that was a false positive passage of music" - with a straight face?
You get terms like false positive (or just plain silence) when we are in qualitative limbo no man's land of medical explanations. Jennifer was dragged into Women's Hospital for ultra sound after ultra sound, fetal monitoring after fetal monitoring, and blood pressure test after blood pressure test because of the false positive results in December. All tests came back normal.
Only twice were the results abnormal:
Yesterday, pediatrician number two (the one who is still working for us) said, "let's put all the small baby/placenta problems behind us. You have a normal baby".
Thanks. That's what we wanted to hear. We don't want to hear "come in for another test", or "feed the baby more than she wants to eat".
Now Jennifer is breast feeding Olivia when Olivia is hungry. What a concept! No Nestle's anything. No false positives. No more dragging Olivia out of bed to force feed her around the clock. Again, hindsight is 20/20. If there were problems, we would have invested more faith in the medical community. In our case though, we knew they were just covering their own asses.
We've been hearing stories of babies in the prairies decades ago who were two pounds at birth. Mothers would put them in a shoe box with cotton and olive oil by an open fire. Some of those babies grew to strapping 6' tall farmers. Some of them probably died. We are thankful that there are modern machines that tell us how well we are. It tips the odds in our favour. During labour, Olivia's heart rate kept dropping. We knew this thanks to fetal monitoring. It helped us know to have a c-section. It probably saved her life.
If you know us, you know we have chosen a different lifestyle in the arts. I guess the alternative lifestyle is spreading into our biology as well. No problem. We roll with all kinds of strange scenarios daily. And, all three of us now are getting along famously, or if you ask one of those midwives: infamously.
What if I used that term in my work? If I hit a wrong note, or played a song in a wrong key while accompanying a jazz singer, could I get away with it by saying: "yes, that was a false positive passage of music" - with a straight face?
You get terms like false positive (or just plain silence) when we are in qualitative limbo no man's land of medical explanations. Jennifer was dragged into Women's Hospital for ultra sound after ultra sound, fetal monitoring after fetal monitoring, and blood pressure test after blood pressure test because of the false positive results in December. All tests came back normal.
Only twice were the results abnormal:
- We went to a private ultra sound clinic. The baby's measurements came back as no growth from the last ultra sound. The moment I heard this, I figured "different machines, different results". You get a blank, silent answer when you bring this up with medical staff. Their answer was, you guessed it, more tests. Why not check the machine?
- Jennifer's blood pressure scored high as a result of our frustration with a prenatal doctor and her insistence of continuing with the tests. We told her we felt like lab rats. After more heated discussion, she took Jennifer's blood pressure. Surprise! It was high! The result of this test? Even more tests.
Yesterday, pediatrician number two (the one who is still working for us) said, "let's put all the small baby/placenta problems behind us. You have a normal baby".
Thanks. That's what we wanted to hear. We don't want to hear "come in for another test", or "feed the baby more than she wants to eat".
Now Jennifer is breast feeding Olivia when Olivia is hungry. What a concept! No Nestle's anything. No false positives. No more dragging Olivia out of bed to force feed her around the clock. Again, hindsight is 20/20. If there were problems, we would have invested more faith in the medical community. In our case though, we knew they were just covering their own asses.
We've been hearing stories of babies in the prairies decades ago who were two pounds at birth. Mothers would put them in a shoe box with cotton and olive oil by an open fire. Some of those babies grew to strapping 6' tall farmers. Some of them probably died. We are thankful that there are modern machines that tell us how well we are. It tips the odds in our favour. During labour, Olivia's heart rate kept dropping. We knew this thanks to fetal monitoring. It helped us know to have a c-section. It probably saved her life.
If you know us, you know we have chosen a different lifestyle in the arts. I guess the alternative lifestyle is spreading into our biology as well. No problem. We roll with all kinds of strange scenarios daily. And, all three of us now are getting along famously, or if you ask one of those midwives: infamously.
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