A Midwife’s Muse

Two and a half years ago we had a house fire, I had thought that it was all finished, and then we received a registered letter today containing, a cheque. £500 from the dishwasher manufacturer, for our distress and to cover the excess on our policy. Suddenly time flew backwards and I was back in my soot-covered home. I sat down and re-read my blog entries from that time and it all seemed surreal, did this really happen to us? As I said at the time  ’It will never happen to me’. I still spread the word about dishwashers, any electrical appliance really, do not run them whilst you are sleeping. Smoke detectors, if you haven’t got one, get one If you have got one check the batteries and make sure that it is working, it could save your life. It did ours.

Today was a day for ‘booking’ women for their maternity care The first two were ‘experienced Mum’s’, midwife speak for been there, done that, both of them are expecting baby number three so really simple visits as they had very few questions. One hoping for a homebirth, the other one having CVS because of her age. The third woman is a primip (primiparous, nulliparous) meaning that she has never given birth before She is not primigravida (first pregnancy) as she had a previous pregnancy which ended at 10 weeks, for lovers of medical jargon she is now classified as P0 G2. This lady has been reading and surfing ++ and still had countless questions and there was one that completely stumped me. She had an early scan to check the pregnancy and wanted to know why they hadn’t measured her wrists and ankles????? What? Measure you when they are scanning baby, why? She had read on the internet, somewhere, that we do this routinely Do we? I have never, ever come across this. I reassured her that she had not missed out on an element of care and this omission was not about to endanger the pregnancy. I’ve been looking it up and the only conclusion that I can arrive at is that it is for some type of estimation of body mass or bone structure/frame size, perhaps it correlates to the way we used to ask shoe size to alert us to a possible cephalo-pelvic disproportion. If anyone out there has any other ideas, or knows what it is about, please let me know.