Alder's Tone

January 16th 2007 – my 33rd birthday – and I was back at St Johns hospital with Sarah. It was a great opportunity to see the lay out of the hospital and the maternity ward specifically. We began in the room I had been in the night before and sat down once more. There were perhaps another 6 or 7 couples there and we began with a video on pain relief during labor. It had clearly been filmed in the 1980’s and featured the who’s who of perms.

As the lights came up after the video Sarah appeared distracted. She was looking over my shoulder at a….whiteboard. “What’s that? Support during labour? Grapes!? Feed the cat!?!? If you…” ”And so class what did you think about pain relief?” asked one of the mid-wives who was taking our tour. PHEW.

We then began the tour itself and it was information packed. In fact my memory of it is something like this (try to keep up), “ok this is the ante natal rooms and from here the café is two floors up through the fire exit that was back there on the left and down stairs. Just buzz if you need to go as you may find it is closed. Opening hours and closing hours are on a sign at the top of those stairs over there next to the fire exit. We now move to the maternity ward itself, use this antiseptic soap when you are coming and going. Even if you are just stepping out side to use your mobile.”

“Can we use our mobiles in the hospital?” someone asked, probably worried the mid-wife would pass out unless someone gave her time to breathe IN.

“Sure you can use them, I mean not in the ward, but in the corridors. Although you may want to bring 10ps for the public phone we have. Ok here are the maternity wards, 4 beds to a room, radio, storage space etc. There are also single rooms but you might want company so unless you really want one you will be in here. Here’s the room for breast feeding, here’s a TV room and here’s a room if you just want to be alone.”

And so on and so forth. It was a LOT to take in. What was very useful about it was seeing the different rooms we would be in at different stages. There was the assessment room which was the initial room we would start in where Sarah would be “checked out” to see how far we through labour she was. From there we saw the labour wards themselves and to be honest that was an eye opener. You looked at the bed and knew this may well be where you met your child for the 1st time. We then went to another labour ward which contained a bath for either during the early stages of labour to relax the woman, or indeed for a water birth. I could tell Sarah liked the look of this as did I, it had a slightly more relaxed feel to it. The only thing being you could not have pain relief apart from gas and air – if you needed anything more than that then you moved into another room.

The tour ended and having seen the labor unit and maternity ward I think it did two things, put our minds at ease and yet got us picturing the process and got the old tickers racing. A very worthwhile experience.

If you have got this far let me bring this to a close by focussing on the central character to this story for one second - Junior. It loves my singing, or hates it depending on what you think a lot of movement means. It is moving around constantly and we think we saw it having hiccups this week! Finally, for the 1st time I was able to place my ear to the womb and hear what I believe to be the babies heart beat. AWESOME, just amazing. I feel I have bonded already with the kid - is it possible to love a bump? Enough of the gushing, I'm off for another listen.....