Hosptial Tour

          Last night we went on the hospital tour to check out the maternity section.  It seems a little early to be doing stuff like that, but the tour at our hospital is only Wednesday nights and with our Bradley Birthing class starting in just two or three weeks which will also be on Wednesday nights, it was either do it now or wait until the first week of January.  And with S due January 23^rd ish, that seemed a bit late, so we decided to get it done.  I’m glad we went, we learned a lot of good information about where we are supposed to go, and how the whole big event is going to work. 

            We were on the tour with three other couples, all of whom where much further along than S, all of the women were between 28-36 weeks, and all of them were expecting girls.  In many ways, we were the odd couple.  For two of the moms, this will be their second child, so they both each had a little girl with them, both little girls were probably about 3 years old.  And before we started walking around and seeing the rooms and such we sat and talked and asked questions and the whole time the two little girls were running around like crazy giggling and chasing each other.  It was pretty cute, but it did make me nervous for my future as a parent because they whole time that they were running circles around us shrieking, I was thinking, “Dear God, someone shut these little monsters up or have them play some where else.”  They were loud and distracting and the nurse giving the tour wasn’t a super loud talker. 

            We learned during this talk a few surprising things.  I think that the thing that surprised me the most was that in the state of Texas your baby has to be given a Vitamin K shot to aid in blood clotting, and an antibiotic eye ointment to prevent eye infection.  If you refuse to let them do this, then they have to call CPS and CPS will at the very least start a file on you.  I think that it goes without saying that as a lesbian couple in a state like Texas, we just cannot risk having CPS get involved with our child in any way.  They also said that their C-section rate was about 30%, which I guess is ok, I don't have much to compare that to.

            Next we got to see the rooms.  The rooms weren’t that exciting, especially after our previous tour of the Birthing Center, where each room was nicer than even any hotel I’ve ever stayed at and nicer in some ways than my own house.  Each room did have it’s own bathroom and a cot for “Dad” to sleep in along with a glider, a TV (and I have my fingers crossed for room 12, which randomly gets HBO even though it isn’t supposed to) and all of the other stuff you would expect in a maternity hospital room.  They did say that S would have to been in the bed when it came time to start actually pushing, but that they can lower the bed almost all of the way to the floor and have a bar she can use for support if she wants to be squatting or on her knees or anything like that.  They also told us that we can video tape the birth if we want, but all of our video has to be waist up sort of stuff, no actual videos of the baby coming out.  Not that we want a video of that, yuck, but I thought it was weird that it is a state law that you couldn’t take video of it.  The nice thing about the room is that it is set up so that once the baby is born it doesn’t leave the room hardly at all.  I think she said that they have to do two basic tests on the baby before it leaves but other than that, it is in the room with you the whole time, which is nice.  They seem to really encourage skin to skin contact with the baby and breastfeeding and establishing a bond with your baby right away, all things I support.

            The other thing that the nurse really seemed to stress was that they will do whatever they can to let you have the experience you want for your birth.  So if you wanted to bring in fans, aroma therapy, music, or whatever, you can do it.  The pregnant ladies discussed playing music for a minute and one was wondering aloud what song she’d want to give birth to.  I suggested Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It, which no one thought was very funny, to my surprise.  I think that would be a hilarious song to give birth to.  But I guess they were all thinking that they wanted something soothing and soulful like Enya or something like that.  Well, that is just so not us.

            And lastly, the most exciting part was when S asked the nurse if I could be on the birth certificate, and she said yes!  She said that we would have to fill out some sort of form/paper work to make that happen, but that I could be on the birth certificate too!  I’m so excited, I didn’t think that it was even possible for that to happen, because again, we are in Texas, but I guess it isn’t a big issue.  Yay!  So excited to be one of baby Jude’s official parents!

**After some basic googling on this issue, I just don’t see how what the nurse told us about being able to put my name on the birth certificate is true.  It doesn’t appear to be legal in Texas to do this from what I can find, so I don’t know what she is talking about.  Erg.  We should have asked more questions.  In the end we need a lawyer anyway, so hopefully we can get the ball rolling on this and find out for sure one way or the other.

-Liz