Why I love the NHS

I've been writing a series of posts (to be continued) on ways to improve postnatal care in order to make those difficult scary first days with your baby a bit easier, or at least not harder, but it has struck me that I should also write a positive post about the NHS and the care we received. Because most of it was excellent. 

The antenatal appointments checked that the baby and I were safe. Blood tests were taken using clean equipment and results came back quickly. I had choices over pain relief. Pregnancy bleeding led to a trip to casualty and to the early pregnancy unit where both times we were seen quickly, scanned and reassured. My blood pressure was frequently checked. The baby's heartbeat was often listened to. Had I needed to get to hospital in an emergency I knew I would have been able to call an ambulance. We had scans to pick up and monitor any problems. I had my own room to give birth in and was constantly monitored by midwives determined to safely deliver me a healthy baby which they did, and to leave me as unbattered as possible, which they did. Doctors operated on me post birth in a clean operating theatre using strong drugs and great skill. Midwives and doctors looked after my baby when she was sick in the first few days, and looked after me too. The wards were clean. I was given food. The medicines were plentiful. The most up to date technology was used to diagnose my baby and to treat her. And in the days and weeks and months since the birth every time we have needed to see a GP, we have been able to, all
medicines needed have been free and all hospital appointments have been with experts. Wow. 

I have complaints and suggestions for improvement but it's important, I think, not to lose sight that all of this was free at the point of use, available to anyone who needs it and delivered in a clean and safe environment by well trained staff. 

So this is a post to balance out the ones about improving postnatal care and to say how grateful I am to the NHS and all who work for it. How lucky we are to have it. 

Related posts:
Ways to improve postnatal care #1: Don't call me mum
Ways to improve postnatal care #2: Change the sheets
Ways to improve postnatal care #3: Help us buy the basics

Ways to improve postnatal care #4: Allow partners 24 hour access

The ideal temperature for a baby's room - learning to trust my instincts

The weather is cold and we've put the heating on for an hour and put the baby to bed in warm pyjamas and a sleeping bag. The temperature egg says it's too hot (anything over 20 degrees and it goes orange for too hot) but my own senses say otherwise. 

And it's made me realise how far we've come since those snowy days when we brought our baby home and we slavishly followed the temperature egg. In part this was due to my confidence being sapped in hospital by midwives taking it in turns to tell me to remove a blanket because my baby was too hot and to add a blanket because she was too cold, and in part because the frequent cot death warnings you see everywhere when you are a new parent warning you not to let your baby overheat. These messages are so alarming that you end up following them to such an extent you drive yourself quite mad - you're not meant to let your baby wear a hat indoors for example, so I'd remove it every time we went into a shop, waking her up in the process, and wake her again putting it on as we left each shop. 

In fact I think in those early days when the baby didn't want to be put down in her basket, it was probably nothing to do with her wanting to be held and largely to do with being too cold, and our determination to make temperature egg yellow thus indicating the ideal room temperature of 16-20 degrees. (There's a big difference, it turns out, between 16 degrees and 20 degrees. 16 degrees feels very cold, 20 degrees is just about comfortable.)

Once we tweaked the window opening and the central heating for ages trying to get a yellow egg only for a community midwife to come round and tell us the house was too cold. That's because we've just got up and not warmed downstairs up yet, we said, and upstairs the egg is yellow, we promise. But she told us sternly it was too cold, before reminding us not to let the baby wear a hat inside. 

When it is too cold (below 16 degrees) the egg turns blue. When it is too hot (over 24 degrees) the egg turns red. And it is true that on the rare occasions the egg has been either of these the house has felt too cold or too hot. But this winter I am going to have a new rule. When it feels hot I shall add a blanket and when it feels cold I shall take one off, and the egg will be no more than a pretty nightlight. See how far we've come. 

Gro-Egg Room Thermometer

Searching for lost children

I watched a heartbreaking programme about Ben Needham this evening. He was a twenty-one month old British boy who went missing on the Greek island Kos in 1991. 

There are some news stories that make a big impact on you and shape how you view the world. They are, I think, the ones you hear about when you are starting to be conscious of the news. Mine split into two categories: non-natural disasters and crimes against individuals  They include the Hillsborough disaster, the Marchioness disaster, the Zebrugge disaster, the Lockerbie disaster, Suzy Lamplugh, Rachel Nickell, Josie Russell and Ben Needham. 

As such, I have thought of his case often. His mother still searches for him twenty years after he disappeared. I understand that she can't stop looking, but what would happen, I wonder, if she found him, separated by culture and language and twenty years of being apart. I wonder this in relation to Madeleine McCann too. What if she is living a happy life with a family and has no memory of her past - would it  be worse for her wellbeing to reveal all and reunite her with her parents or to let her continue that life with no knowledge of how she came to be living it? 

What can you hope for a child who has literally been lost? For them to have a happy life I guess - that is all I can come up with. It's hard though. What do you do if getting them back ruins their life by turning it inside out? I cannot imagine any parent saying okay, we have found them, now let us leave them alone to continue the life they now have. Such a choice is biblical in the extent of its horror. But whatever might happen if you found them, I understand that the parents can never stop looking. 

www.helpfindben.co.uk

Related posts:
The risks you dare not take
My baby, my daemon

Some blogs and articles I like (an occasional series)

This post from Sprinkles and Sprogs about pushing your luck.

This post from A Mother Knows about pre natal testing.

This post from When you ARE that woman on Gigglebiz and comic timing.

Ways to improve postnatal care #3: Help us buy the basics

Really I think as many maternity pads and nappies as needed should be provided by the NHS, free at point of use, during your stay in hospital. After all we don't take in our own bandages and antiseptic when we have an operation. Let's begin from what the current situation is however and accept that they aren't. 

But even if they aren't free, they should be available. No one knows how long they will have to stay in hospital post birth so no one knows the quantities they will need. And no one wants to have to send their partner, parent or friend on a hunt to find supplies when they should be with you. 

Have a shop in each maternity unit, or even a trolly going round the beds, and sell maternity pads, nappies, wipes, cotton wool, nipple cream and even shampoo and toothbrushes. And do so at high street prices, not vastly inflated prices. 

If you can have burger bars in hospitals then how about a branch of Boots or Superdrug - it really would make life easier. 

Ways to improve postnatal care #1: Don't call me mum
Ways to improve postnatal care #2: Change the sheets
Ways to improve postnatal care #4: Allow partners 24 hour access
Why I love the NHS

The truth about breastfeeding

A lot of articles and blogs I have read about breastfeeding difficulties are either defensive or apologetic. I am going to attempt to be neither.

Both my baby and I struggled with breastfeeding. Hand problems (Carpel tunnel syndrome followed by tenosynovitis) meant I struggled to hold my baby to the breast. Post birth surgery meant my body was tired and full of drugs. My baby was a little poorly and also a little sleepy. Sucking was difficult. Even without all of this we may have found breastfeeding hard. Many mums and babies do. 

But when the paediatrician said yes, breast is best but really the key thing is to feed your baby, we had no choice. We gave her formula. This gave her the strength to learn to breastfeed. But my supply was low. The way to raise it, said the health visitors and midwives, is to feed the baby at least every three hours and express in between. As each feed could take an hour this left very little time for anything else. I gave up on it quickly. 

A health visitor told me to massage my breasts while feeding to encourage milk flow. I was already tired and emotional with low milk supply. After that I was tired and emotional with low milk supply and bruised breasts. 

The baby lost weight. Lots of weight. Then we started formula feeds as a matter of course, starting with breast and 'topping up' with formula. The baby started to put on weight. Since then in fact we have mix fed. At nearly ten months we still do. It works for us. 

Breast is best. I get that. It has huge benefits for the baby and it's convenient. When it works that is. But the adverts that say this, the ones with peachy looking breasts and rosebud nipples attached to a perfect baby looking blissed out, they do us a huge disservice, because they make it look so easy that if we struggle we think we've failed. Far better a campaign that says breast is best but boy is it hard and please persevere anyway. Have a picture of a mum with bags under her dull sleepless eyes and bulgy veins on her breasts and raised nodules on her nipples and a slogan that says 'It might be shitty but it might get better if you carry on.' Such ads might stop women feeling like failures. 

We're led to believe that breastfeeding is so natural that it's like one of those crafts we've lost in the modern age, like thatching a roof, painting frescoes and making our own soap from horses hooves. We feel that before formula existed women must surely have found it easy because they had no choice. 

Actually here's what I think happened to those women and babies for whom it wasn't easy.  Women whose babies had died acted as wet nurses for some babies. Other babies were fed cow's milk, water and other liquids and some of these got ill and others didn't. Some women had the village wise woman or an older relative sit with her day in day out helping her, tweaking the nipples into shape and helping her hold the baby, until they could do it alone. And some babies, well some got weaker and weaker and died. We're lucky to live in a time where there is an alternative. 

The more people who, head held high, say breastfeeding is difficult and you are not a failure if you struggle and you are not a failure if you stop, the better. Breastfeeding rates in the UK are low and I know the authorities are keen to increase them. But lying to us about breastfeeding and pretending it is easy and pretending it works for everyone is, I am sure of it, the wrong way to encourage people to do it. 

You can do it: babies, students and the need for cliches

I teach journalism at Goldsmiths College (surely a line that should be in a Pulp song) and term starts this coming week. The teaching is mainly classroom based and practical and I enjoy it a lot, especially seeing students' work improve over the course. 

But what I am most proud of is the few occasions over the six years I have done the job where I feel I have really made a difference to someone's life, not by teaching interviewing skills or sending an assignment back until the apostrophes are in the right place, but by being encouraging about a job interview or a competition entry or an internship so that they decide to go for it. Where this results in success the course of their lives can be changed, and where it doesn't it often gives them the enthusiasm and fire in the belly needed to apply for other things which then changes the course of their lives. 

So many students I meet seem to have never been told they have as much chance as anyone else, that they have to be in it to win it, that they'll miss 100 percent of the shots they don't take, and all the other cliches which mean the same thing. While they have already done well getting into a competitive university and onto a competitive course, me saying this about jobs and work related opportunities is sometimes the first time they have heard it. 

I remember having dinner in my mid twenties with a man who was older than me and enjoying success with his journalism and books. How was it I was so confident, he asked me. Much of that confidence is a facade of course - isn't that the case for everyone? - but I realised that the confidence I do have is from my parents and grandparents (and now my husband), and to some extent teachers, consistently encouraging me, saying well done and showing an interest in things I was applying to do. 

A baby and a student are different in many ways of course. But playing with my baby just before term starts has caused me to reflect a little on the similarities. Because every day with the baby is about encouraging her to achieve what it is she can already do - this jigsaw, that peepo, this rollover, that waving - and pushing her to achieve more - hand clapping, crawling, chewing etc. Some of these, crawling for example, other babies can do already. But encouragement is not about saying 'they can do it so why can't you', it's about saying 'work hard and one day you'll be able to do that too.' And though the goals are different, the method, despite the 18 years or so age gap, is exactly the same.