Midwifery Frustration

Today was supposed to have been my first visit with the midwife I had selected. I am somewhere around twelve weeks pregnant, and still haven't even had a confirmation of my pregnancy (other than the home-pregnancy test I took). I am pretty sure I am pregnant and would be pretty darn depressed to find out that I am not, as my waistline is growing beyond control and my chest has miraculously grown a cup size or two! I had been looking forward to hearing the baby's heartbeat and doing all the stuff that pregnant women do when being visited by or visiting their doctor. However, today I was really disappointed when my midwife never showed for our appointment.

My experience so far during this pregnancy with any medical practitioner has not been a good one. I left three or four messages at the office of an OB/GYN that I had seen before and really liked; never heard back. Then my sister Erin who is also pregnant suggested I look into midwives, which was a wonderful suggestion; the type of care midwives have to offer seems to fit pretty well with my no fuss, au naturale attitude. Plus I was really interested in a more homey atmosphere with the options of a home birth or water birth. So I set about looking for midwives in my area. There were four in the phone book. Can you believe that?!!! Four!!! In all of Tampa there are only four midwives!! I thought for sure there would be more. One of the midwives turned out to be a nurse midwife, which means she won't deliver anywhere else but in a hospital. One turned out not to be a midwife at all but a douhla. One number was no longer in service and the other was a birthing center about 45 minutes from me. It seemed my options were pretty limited.

In talking to the douhla, though, she knew of two other midwives that were not listed at all. I contacted one and set an appointment based on the fact that the midwife offered a birthing center. I thought at the time that I would rather go there than have the baby at home. After going to my fiasco of an appointment, which lasted three hours and all they did was take an hour to fill out paperwork for me when I could have done it in fifteen minutes, take two hours to take my blood pressure, make sure my reflexes were ok, and then they basically sent me on my merry little way, I decided I would go to option B. Option B was today's appointment.

Now I am on Options B and C. I called the birthing center in Dunedin (the one that is 45 minutes away) to see when I could schedule an appointment. The next available day for an orientation, which they require you to go through before you can see a midwife, was May the 24th. Then, if I qualified for their services, I would have to set another appointment to see the midwife. The girl I spoke with made it sound like that would be even later than the beginning of June. After that phone call the midwife I was supposed to see today called back and apologized profusely for her absent-mindedness. Thankfully I had had time to cool off from my irritation and disappointment, plus I was really ready to just get this stuff started, so I rescheduled for tomorrow.

Let's cross our fingers and hope everything goes well!

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1 comments:

Erin said...

Woo hoo! Great site! Sorry you're still having a hard time - you might just have to suck it up and go to a midwife that delivers at a hospital. :-( I know it's not what you want, but something's gotta give. Hope things get better soon. Let me know how it goes tomorrow. Good luck!