So yesterday we had an appointment with my regular OB doctor. I drank 6 ounces of what tasted like a flat cola but had the punch of a full pot of coffee after not having much sugar over the last 6 months. This vile liquid was for the gestational diabetes blood test that takes them a mere 6 seconds to do...but the sugar lasts for hours, and hours, and hours!!!
First, I must say that in typical healthcare fashion, we are made to wait for what seems like 20-30 minutes (after blood is drawn for the diabetes test) before we even hear the doctor's voice. When we do finally hear his voice in the hall we hear him say that he wants to do an ultrasound on me. The nurse's aid comes in and I emphatically tell her that we just had an ultrasound at the specialist's two weeks ago and don't understand why this doc would want to do another one when that doc said no more for a month. AND we were only scheduled to do a glucose test and a non-stress test. Of course she hasn't a clue, but more on that later...after several more minutes the doc comes in and moves us over to the non-stress test chair area not mentioning that he didn't remember why he asked us to schedule this appointment in the first place.
I am then told to sit in this torture device to have a baby monitor strapped to my belly by the world's most inept nurse's aid. This chair they put me in reminded me a bit of a dentist's chair, as it reclined backwards just enough to make me severly uncomfortable, but instead of a leg platform to elevate your legs this one had these leg braces placed at uncomfortable angles just like the stir-ups on the doctor's exam table. Add a lumpy pillow at my lumbar to push the belly outwards and the overly tight straps that are supposed to "hold" the monitors in place, if the nurse's aid had the slightest clue, and you have one very uncomfortable pregnant woman who just wants to poke the nurse's aid in the eye, run a marathon and/or jump over multiple story buildings from the excess sugar in her system! So here I am pushing the heart rate monitor into my belly with one hand while holding a plastic baton, similar to a nurse's call button on hospital bed, in the other hand with the expectation that I press this every time I feel the baby move and the nurse's aid has the audacity to ask me if I want a juice to help "activate" the baby some. What this uber-twit failed to tell me was that this was a fruit juice, with an additional 24 grams of sugar, not some medical miracle that stimulates a baby's movement for this test!!! (But, hey, she did say she actually saw my belly move with a kick from the baby.) All the while sitting in the corner of a dead-end hallway with just a flimsy cloth screen to block out the view from passers-by, my belly exposed with smears of blue goo from where she slid the monitor across (up and down, from side to side, trying to find the baby's heartbeat) rapidly cooling in the open air, listening to the chatter of the incredibly ignorant employees yucking it up and talking about the other patients and acting ridiculously unprofessional. Feeling terribly frightened that the future of our world lies in the medical hands of kids like the girls hired to work in my doctor's office.
All the while Ty is sitting in a chair next to me wondering why the doctor would say that he disagreed with the specialist's theory of "alls well that looks well" in the ultrasounds, and is now implying that these non-stress tests will show more than the all high resolution ultrasounds we have been subjected to for the last 2 1/2 months! He says the heart rate measured against the movement monitor will tell us more about the baby's condition and now he wants to have us do this WEEKLY because while these tests are so telling, they are really only good for telling a story of about one week at a time!!!!!
The doc comes back after 20-25 minutes of what amounts to pure mental and physical agony for me and says the measurements are positive and that we appear to even be getting the desired increase of 10-15 beats in heart rate when the baby moves (I can see with my own eyes that it isn't every time she moves, but he doesn't say this to us). So they send us on our merry little way and Ty heads out to work while I try to figure out how to counter the sugar high I am feeling...something not easily accomplished as I have now injested over 75 grams of sugar substances in a 2 hour period.
I try to counteract the sugar with a high dose of protein, but that just makes the baby kick, jump and move all around like a super athelete in my belly. I try going to the store to burn off the sugar and get a bit of shopping done, but that just makes my feet tired and my back ache even more than it did earlier in the torture chair. I try to crash on the couch hoping that the sugar will eventually wear off and I will go into the obligatory coma after ingesting so much sugar, but all that happens is that I feel edgy and annoyed from inactivity and the baby continues to do ballet twists and hockey splits all at once! The baby never did quiet down and I lay awake feeling the miraculous movements I had only guessed before to be baby movements, until well after midnight.
The good that came of this appointment...I can honestly say that Baby Lucanne is officially freed of whatever restraints she had previously for movements. She is still as active today as she was last night. And we did find out that she is still doing what she is supposed to do by having the increase in heart rate when she moves (this officially means that her neurological functions are appearing to be increasing as normal).
Of the bad that we came to realize with this appointment...our doctor hires complete morons to work in his office, doesn't have a clue what he is scheduling appointments for and obviously doesn't read his notes or charts prior to seeing his patients. He continues to give us the worse case scenario treatment and we are now feeling that he is doing a lot of covering his butt for any potential mishap that could befall our little princess. We definitely feel like his goal is more to keep us (as fairly well informed parents-to-be/medically trained professionals) from suing him for medical malpractice by making us come to town so often and implying that nothing is as good an indicator as whatever next step he has in store for us. And we experienced first hand the fact that "No Child Left Behind" meant only that we will continue to push uneducated morons out of the school system without them ever learning how to be anything more than moronic teen-twits well into their 20's.
We are both more than just a bit annoyed, but as I told Ty yesterday I will allow him two more non-stress tests until I see the specialist at the end of the month. If at that time all still seems to be progressing well, I will suggest to the OB that these non-stress tests feel like a waste of time for me and if he isn't seeing any negative changes that I will not continue to come down every week just for his whimsy. While I do enjoy seeing and hearing my baby I am willing to wait until she has decided to join the world at large rather than continue to line the doctor's pockets!
First, I must say that in typical healthcare fashion, we are made to wait for what seems like 20-30 minutes (after blood is drawn for the diabetes test) before we even hear the doctor's voice. When we do finally hear his voice in the hall we hear him say that he wants to do an ultrasound on me. The nurse's aid comes in and I emphatically tell her that we just had an ultrasound at the specialist's two weeks ago and don't understand why this doc would want to do another one when that doc said no more for a month. AND we were only scheduled to do a glucose test and a non-stress test. Of course she hasn't a clue, but more on that later...after several more minutes the doc comes in and moves us over to the non-stress test chair area not mentioning that he didn't remember why he asked us to schedule this appointment in the first place.
I am then told to sit in this torture device to have a baby monitor strapped to my belly by the world's most inept nurse's aid. This chair they put me in reminded me a bit of a dentist's chair, as it reclined backwards just enough to make me severly uncomfortable, but instead of a leg platform to elevate your legs this one had these leg braces placed at uncomfortable angles just like the stir-ups on the doctor's exam table. Add a lumpy pillow at my lumbar to push the belly outwards and the overly tight straps that are supposed to "hold" the monitors in place, if the nurse's aid had the slightest clue, and you have one very uncomfortable pregnant woman who just wants to poke the nurse's aid in the eye, run a marathon and/or jump over multiple story buildings from the excess sugar in her system! So here I am pushing the heart rate monitor into my belly with one hand while holding a plastic baton, similar to a nurse's call button on hospital bed, in the other hand with the expectation that I press this every time I feel the baby move and the nurse's aid has the audacity to ask me if I want a juice to help "activate" the baby some. What this uber-twit failed to tell me was that this was a fruit juice, with an additional 24 grams of sugar, not some medical miracle that stimulates a baby's movement for this test!!! (But, hey, she did say she actually saw my belly move with a kick from the baby.) All the while sitting in the corner of a dead-end hallway with just a flimsy cloth screen to block out the view from passers-by, my belly exposed with smears of blue goo from where she slid the monitor across (up and down, from side to side, trying to find the baby's heartbeat) rapidly cooling in the open air, listening to the chatter of the incredibly ignorant employees yucking it up and talking about the other patients and acting ridiculously unprofessional. Feeling terribly frightened that the future of our world lies in the medical hands of kids like the girls hired to work in my doctor's office.
All the while Ty is sitting in a chair next to me wondering why the doctor would say that he disagreed with the specialist's theory of "alls well that looks well" in the ultrasounds, and is now implying that these non-stress tests will show more than the all high resolution ultrasounds we have been subjected to for the last 2 1/2 months! He says the heart rate measured against the movement monitor will tell us more about the baby's condition and now he wants to have us do this WEEKLY because while these tests are so telling, they are really only good for telling a story of about one week at a time!!!!!
The doc comes back after 20-25 minutes of what amounts to pure mental and physical agony for me and says the measurements are positive and that we appear to even be getting the desired increase of 10-15 beats in heart rate when the baby moves (I can see with my own eyes that it isn't every time she moves, but he doesn't say this to us). So they send us on our merry little way and Ty heads out to work while I try to figure out how to counter the sugar high I am feeling...something not easily accomplished as I have now injested over 75 grams of sugar substances in a 2 hour period.
I try to counteract the sugar with a high dose of protein, but that just makes the baby kick, jump and move all around like a super athelete in my belly. I try going to the store to burn off the sugar and get a bit of shopping done, but that just makes my feet tired and my back ache even more than it did earlier in the torture chair. I try to crash on the couch hoping that the sugar will eventually wear off and I will go into the obligatory coma after ingesting so much sugar, but all that happens is that I feel edgy and annoyed from inactivity and the baby continues to do ballet twists and hockey splits all at once! The baby never did quiet down and I lay awake feeling the miraculous movements I had only guessed before to be baby movements, until well after midnight.
The good that came of this appointment...I can honestly say that Baby Lucanne is officially freed of whatever restraints she had previously for movements. She is still as active today as she was last night. And we did find out that she is still doing what she is supposed to do by having the increase in heart rate when she moves (this officially means that her neurological functions are appearing to be increasing as normal).
Of the bad that we came to realize with this appointment...our doctor hires complete morons to work in his office, doesn't have a clue what he is scheduling appointments for and obviously doesn't read his notes or charts prior to seeing his patients. He continues to give us the worse case scenario treatment and we are now feeling that he is doing a lot of covering his butt for any potential mishap that could befall our little princess. We definitely feel like his goal is more to keep us (as fairly well informed parents-to-be/medically trained professionals) from suing him for medical malpractice by making us come to town so often and implying that nothing is as good an indicator as whatever next step he has in store for us. And we experienced first hand the fact that "No Child Left Behind" meant only that we will continue to push uneducated morons out of the school system without them ever learning how to be anything more than moronic teen-twits well into their 20's.
We are both more than just a bit annoyed, but as I told Ty yesterday I will allow him two more non-stress tests until I see the specialist at the end of the month. If at that time all still seems to be progressing well, I will suggest to the OB that these non-stress tests feel like a waste of time for me and if he isn't seeing any negative changes that I will not continue to come down every week just for his whimsy. While I do enjoy seeing and hearing my baby I am willing to wait until she has decided to join the world at large rather than continue to line the doctor's pockets!
