Challenge 4

BIRTH DECISIONS
 

I had a hard time before becoming a mom because while pregnant, I realized there are like 1000000 decisions that you have to make before the baby arrives. 

You have to weigh who you are, your budget, your naive concept of the kind of parent you’re going to be, throw in a pinch of guesswork and you make choices. I choose mostly granola, obviously.

One aspect of that choice is where to have the baby. Birth center or hospital. I’m not devoting blog space to that one, because my blog is just not where you research such a personal decision. I know most people choose hospital, even if they’re pretty granola, because the risks of not going to a hospital just don’t seem to outweigh the benefits in some people’s minds.

 I am not into IV’s and constant monitoring and the whole thing. I was naive about birth. It hurt MUCH worse than my concept of it in my mind. I guess, you just can’t comprehend it really, until you’ve been through it. 

Many women are so empowered by it, and I struggle with feeling empowered in general, so I don’t know how empowered I felt or feel now. The benefits to me were the close and calm care provider in my midwife, the comfort of the birth center, the relaxed atmosphere, bringing baby home immediately, the tub, the tub, the tub, and the tub.

I’m going somewhere completely different with this, I promise. 

So, hospital or BC, you need to choose some basic medical stuff for your new tiny human immediately. Vitamin K shots, yes or no? Antibiotic eye ointment, yes or no?

Vitamin K we chose to do. The risk of it seemed low, and the only sad part was causing my baby such immediate pain. There is an option to do an oral Vitamin K, which we looked into but weren’t sure about it’s effectiveness. So we made the midwife prick our tiny human. He wasn’t happy about it, I wasn’t yet over the birth shock, so I wasn’t too traumatized by his crying.

 Vitamin K, I let them prick my baby. As a mostly granola momma, I really don’t think most babies need vitamin K. I think there has to be some evolutionary reason babies don’t have much. I’m sure it’s fine. BUT WHAT IF IT WASN'T WITH MY BABY, Y’KNOW? I couldn't find any evidence it was harmful.

Eye ointment. Antibiotics from the second you enter the world. Not very granola. We were a no go on this one. It just seemed so harsh and then he couldn’t look at his momma’s face. If you’re trying to decide on this, it’s erythromycin ointment and you can look into it more carefully. I thought the best thing would be to not squirt antibiotics at my child immediately. Just yuck. “One of the major issues of our medical system, this overeager antibiotic shit” I thought.

On day six our brand new baby got an eye infection. Oozing yellow pus. We took him to urgent care, they sent us to the ER. He wound up on 48 hours of IV antibiotics to ensure any possible systemic infections it causes didn’t kill him. He probably had zero systemic infections. I was probably just an eye infection. It couldn’t happened anyway. If he had been 12 weeks when it happened, he’d have gotten the same ointment they prescribe at birth. He didn’t It was without a doubt the two most horrific days of my husband’s and my life. It was horrible.

My granola suggestion might be to get the ointment. Ours is a worst case scenario. I have friends who had healthy babies who never got sick. We’re the only country in the world that pour antibiotics into newborn’s eyes.

But this was our story.

Parenting decisions are hard.