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MAMA-KANGAROO 550
I am 36 years old. Single. Renting an apartment. School librarian. With each new period, my fear that I will be no-one’s mom grew more and more unbearable. Of course, it is not very difficult to find rational excuses for each failure of this kind in Serbia. My last period started on May 19, 2008. I certainly did not wait for the next one to ensure myself that I am pregnant. Pregnancy is a project. The earlier you start working on it, the more likely it is that your baby will be healthy and safely born. The first thing to do, as soon as the pink line appeared on the pregnancy test bar: quit smoking. For ever. Without the last one for the road, and one more after that etc., etc. Facilitating circumstance: you will sleep over the crisis at the beginning of your pregnancy. I slept over an entire week with just one break – to visit my gynaecologist, of course. Whatever your opinion about the health care system is, it is necessary to pay regular visits to the gynaecologist in the public healthcare institution. I don’t believe in the healthcare system. Fortunately for me, I cannot remember having any health problems at all. However, even before the pregnancy I had regular gynaecological examinations in the public healthcare institution, since my medical records have been, by some lucky accident, assigned to an excellent doctor and a charming, witty and noble human being, Doctor Emilija Markovic. When you are over 35, your pregnancy, no matter how easy, is a high risk pregnancy. Dr Markovic followed my pregnancy from the first until the last day without any mistakes, delays and doubts. Maybe I should also be grateful for the decent equipment on the Gynaecology Ward of the New Belgrade Block 44 public healthcare institution and for the extreme kindness and helpfulness of its nurses and midwives. It was completely clear to me at all times what is going on with me and my baby, what to expect and what to do myself. I had an easy pregnancy. Actually I have never felt so good before that. However, the fear of possible troubles, which, in my opinion, always occur after being admitted to hospital where you are left at the mercy of doctors and nurses and where you have to rely on your bribing skills, grew day after day. Should I bribe a doctor? Should I pay for examination in a private clinic so that the doctor to whom I paid for that examination would accept to assist me during my labour? Is it better to look for a connection among doctors or among midwives? How many connections should I have and of what kind in order to enable my baby and myself to survive the childbirth. And how much does it cost? Is there a published price list of medical services or one should be an experienced evaluator? Dr Markovic just laughed, of course, and claimed that I did not need a connection. She sent me to a parenting school with my public healthcare institution. Knowledge is the best cure against fear. You attend all the lectures, read all the recommended and not recommended literature and browse all the Internet pages about pregnancy and child birth. Having considered all that, I decided to deliver my baby in the Clinical Hospital Centre (CHC) Zvezdara. Small hospital can at least guarantee you that someone will be there beside you during delivery. Besides, I wished to give birth in a delivery bathtub (in case my baby is born at the moment everyone is busy drinking coffee somewhere else, at least he would not fall from the table and hit his head on the floor) in the presence of the baby’s father (a husband is movable and loud creature able to call doctor and bring him/her if needed, in case the baby pops up his head when everybody else has better things to do than to attend my delivery). That was my point of view at the time. Obviously, the fear of delivery is not the fear of pain or anything else accompanying the childbirth. It is a common fear of neglect combined with the lack of knowledge in a woman giving birth, mixed perhaps with the fear of all that ignorance. How to find a connection in the hospital you chose for delivery? Is there a common market or is it specific for each hospital? What to tell to that connection? What to ask from that person? Why do you need a connection? I did not want to be delivered by someone just because it is his/her shift at that particular moment, although my baby does not want to be born at that exact time. I also did not want to bring someone to hospital in the middle of the night or during vacation, just to have that particular person deliver my baby. It is stupid. I just wanted to be sure that someone will cut the umbilical cord and give baby a bath after it is born. And it seems a bit offensive thing to tell a doctor you wish to be your connection. Sounds like you think that his colleagues are all villains. Which is exactly the first thing that comes to your mind. My doctor laughed again. At the end of the sixth month of my pregnancy she sent me to CHC Zvezdara for examination, since I was of the opinion that the last part of pregnancy should be maintained simultaneously at the place of delivery. Anyway, I thought that talking to some of the doctors there was a wise thing to do. I went there one Thursday, to be examined by a doctor who was present in the clinic at that moment. It wasn’t important who that doctor was; I did not know anything about any of them. If I was lucky to get a good gynaecologist at the public healthcare institution, the fact that I got Dr. Mitrovic as my second obgyn should have enticed me to try playing lottery. He told me what I had already known, but I left the clinic with an impression that my pregnancy would be handled by a serious, careful and good doctor. Besides, waiting for the examination (one piece of advice: bring a chicken for snack – you will wait endlessly), I saw that the hospital organized psychical and physical preparation for delivery. That was convenient. Every public healthcare institution has one, but they are a perfect opportunity to acquaint yourself with the atmosphere, perhaps hear impressions from other pregnant women and get to know someone in the hospital of your delivery. I decided to attend psychical and physical preparatory lessons at the hospital. I am pretty smart and I often make, as you can see, smart decisions, but this is the smartest decision I have ever made in my life. I presume the content of physical and physical preparations is more or less the same or similar everywhere. But Slavica, the midwife in charge of psychical and physical preparations in the CHC Zvezdara is the best advisor and friend you can ever have. I have never seen a medical worker so profoundly humane and dedicated to his/her work and patients entrusted to his/her care. So, I stopped looking for a connection for childbirth. All the doctors I met during my pregnancy, not only in these two institutions but also at the Health Institute for Mother and Child and Visegradska, were unexpectedly kind and really useful. My risky pregnancy was not risky at all, not even tense or particularly interesting and it was maintained in the public healthcare institutions following the rule books of those institutions. I did not worry about who would deliver my baby and how. I went to hospital after twenty contractions in intervals shorter than 10 minutes. Hahaha! Almost true. I actually tried to get to the delivery table during the entire week, day after day, before the labour actually started. It was important to me that my child was not a Pisces. I entered the delivery room on February 18, 2009 at 7 AM. It was snowing and it was cold. The delivery room was no exception. I asked (and got) additional blanket. Dr. Ljatifi broke my waters around 9 AM and informed me that the delivery bathtub unfortunately leaked and that it could not be used, but that was not so bad since I would most certainly freeze in it, knowing the conditions outside. After that, Dr. Obradovic came to shortly massage my cervix, which did not want to move from the initial two-finger dilation and repeated the fact about the bathtub. You can imagine my surprise and joy when I realised that the doctor who was coming as a representative of the afternoon shift was Dr. Mitrovic. I did not expect that. The day before that he was on his vacation. Not only Dr. Mitrovic is great gynaecologist, he is also the best plumber among gynaecologists. He added stimulation to the infusion I was being administered and fixed the bath tub. (Wash basin and cloth! Genius sometimes comes in unusual forms). Forty minutes later I went out of the bath tub fully dilated and tried to lower the baby in the position I learned during preparatory lessons on the table. (Just for your info, mixed phase does not resemble any of the things it is compared with during the preparatory lessons. You will recognise it when you hear yourself breathing the third type. In my case, Slavica recognised it before me, since the others hear you breathing better than you can. Yes, she comes to visit you several times during the labour to see how you are doing, to encourage and help you). I gave birth to my healthy and beautiful baby at 3:55 PM and he had his umbilical cord wrapped two times around his neck. Presence of a husband during the childbirth is a great and important assistance. There is nothing bloody or terrible about it. He won’t faint. But he will check the CTG readings, bring you wet gauze to moisten your lips, bring you Labello or a bucket to vomit into. He will call a doctor or a midwife and tell them about your needs. He will help you turn over and cover you when you are cold. And you will have someone sharing your priorities to chat with when the contractions stop. My husband was even then on his way to leave me (he has moved out completely now) but during the delivery no one was greater friend to me than he was. I chose baby friendly programme. After I saw the cobwebs in the baby friendly room, I looked around with amazement and anticipation for a spider (what must be the size of it when it made a web like this!). Paediatric nurses show you everything and they are very helpful, sweet and kind – all but one: straight brown hair, glasses, brown clogs, hates children and women in labour, she is curt, impertinent and not very clever: she gossips about patients; one of the patients even told me she asked for money to give baby supplemental feeding). One should avoid addressing the midwives, they will not help you the least bit and any additional problems are possible and expected. You don’t take Pampers diapers to the maternity ward; they arrive long after the baby does. Hospital diapers and baby clothes are so chemically processed that only the babies with the thickest skin do not get rash. There is no vegetarian food. Visits are allowed every day. My stay at the baby friendly ward shattered all the myths about maternal instinct. Not only that I don’t instinctively understand what my baby needs when he cries – I don’t even hear him crying while I sleep. As I spent my pregnancy learning everything that can be learned about childbirth, I spent my postpartum period learning lessons about newborns. If they say that control examination is painless, you will see their nose growing as they speak. Actually, the examination performed by Dr Markovic was indeed painless – 3 weeks after delivery. The control examination performed upon me 5 days after delivery by a gray-haired, tall and very pompous doctor, one of those who you don’t ask questions unless you have graduated from the Faculty of Medicine with high average mark as he will not make an effort to reply to you otherwise, was the most painful experience I ever had. Five days before that I had a baby, what about that! I am prone to thinking that rough treatment was intentional. Your episiotomy hurts more and more each day and then, ten days later, it stops hurting completely. Long after that you wonder whether you should sue the doctor for such a clumsy stitch which looks like a deep furrow. And then comes Dr Markovic and says that the stitch is fine and heals nicely. Six weeks later you can feel only a tiny knob under your finger. A baby is not a machine which poops, eats and sleeps, my baby has a character of his own from the day one. They say the love comes later. I loved my child while he was still in the womb. The way my belly responded to sounds and touches. I expected him to look exactly as he looked when they placed my newborn son on my breasts. If I could choose from a sample of babies I would still have chosen my baby. We have spent a couple of hours apart two times till now. In both cases I felt as a crying, tender shell full of leaking milk. When you leave your baby to the care of others don’t forget to take enough nursing bra pads with you, as all of them will be used. In any case, my experience during pregnancy and childbirth make me blush for my prejudices against doctors and healthcare system. However, my experiences from the maternity ward prevent me from thinking that it was something more than just a string of lucky coincidences. *** I would like to clarify one thing about the maternity leave. Pregnant woman is legally obliged to start the maternity leave one month before her delivery date, but it still does not mean that social insurance service is obliged to start paying that leave in the amount of 100% of her regular salary. There cannot be any discussion about payments until employer submits her documentation to the social insurance service. And he cannot do that until the new mother brings the birth registry certificate, which she cannot do before the municipality of birth issues it. And the municipality of birth cannot issue it before it is notified about childbirth by the hospital. Period of notification is three weeks, as well as for all the other actions. If this looks like the only action to kill the dragon in fairytales, it is not accidental. Therefore, if you haven’t found a sponsor for baby and yourself, do that immediately and try to keep him at least until baby is three months old. Self-supporting women should not have children. The message is quite clear. Additional info: self-supporting mothers should prepare themselves not only for the difficult course, but also for the course intentionally made even more difficult for them. It is clear even at hospital when you are given the instruction how to enter your child in the birth registry. Married women enter their children by having their husbands submit the documents, including mother’s birth registry certificate not older than 6 months, and single women have to bring all the documents including their birth registry certificate obtained after childbirth (written in bold letters and additionally underlined – someone must have had such fun). In other words, if you don’t have anyone to take care of your baby and breastfeed it, if your episiotomy hurts like hell and you dared to be a self-supporting mother in Serbia, it will become clear to you from the day one that you are stupid and ugly and that you made a terrifying choice.
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STORIES FROM MATERNITY WARDS Mama-Kangaroo 002
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