More baby stuff..

I wrote this post at the beginning of February but refrained from posting it as I didn`t want to stress out my friend who was about to give birth. Lots of random ramblings!! Yesterday I went to visit my neighbour in the hospital. It was a different hospital to the one I had been to see her in when she was hospitalised early in her pregnancy because the hospital that she had planned to give birth at was full so she had to go somewhere else. Her doctor went with her apparently though. The hospital is one of those big Japanese general hospitals, the ones that strike fear into the heart of most foreigners because they have a bad reputation for being dirty and to have archaic practices. This place smelt clean enough but what really struck me is how different my own birth experience would have been if I had decided to give birth somewhere like that. When I was pregnant I didn`t give the whole thing very much thought. I had been to a gynocologist in Aira before and decided that that was where I wanted to give birth. Alot of people thought I was crazy because there was a gyno within walking distance of our old apartment but as I have an in-built hatred of hospitals having been in and out of them as a child for various reasons, I like the place in Aira because it didn`t feel like a hospital, it felt safe and clean. I didn`t think too much about what kind of birth I wanted as I just wanted the baby to get here safely and I trusted my doctor to do that. I never thought about whether I wanted to room-in with my baby or not because at Takeuchi (where I gave birth) rooming-in is a given. Later on in my pregnancy I decided that I wanted to breast-feed if possible and they respected my desire for the baby not to be given anything other than breast-milk. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to give birth there because their approach matched the one that I didn`t even know I had yet. Yesterday I thanked my lucky stars that I found Takeuchi (Thanks Jenn!) because the hospital my neighbour gave birth in went strongly against all the things I came to believe in while pregnant/ in the early weeks of being a Mum. They feed the babies to a schedule and I happened to be there at feeding time. The baby was fast asleep and wasn`t interested in boob so after trying for a couple of minutes to wake her/ make her nurse, they stuck a bottle in her mouth and she sucked that down in her sleep. I wanted to cry because it was so obvious that the reason she wasn`t interested in boob was because she had already found an easier way to feed. I wanted to tell my neighbour that it was ok to tell them that she didn`t want the baby to have any bottles yet but at the same time I didn`t want to stress her out as she clearly hadn`t wanted to give birth at that hospital and not being allowed to room-in with her baby was stressing her out enough. Oh, I forgot to mention that, not only is she not allowed to room-in with the baby, she isn`t even allowed to take the baby to her room during the day. I was like WTF?!?! What kind of barbaric practise is that?? How are they going to bond? How is my poor neighbour going to get any rest when she spends all day sitting on a bench in the baby room because she doesn`t want to be away from her baby. (A feeling that I completely understand because I didn`t want Joey to be away from my for more than a few minutes at a time in that first week) I was telling my Mum all this on the phone last night and even she was shocked because that kind of thing is so outdated. I now understand why people are so opposed to giving birth at those big hospitals and why they will do anything to avoid it. I had a perfect birth experience so I always thought that in the big scheme of things, where you give birth doesn`t matter so much as long as the baby gets here but yesterday I realise how wrong I was and was very grateful that my husband didn`t try and make me give birth somewhere closer to our old apartment. Updated to add: My friend went to stay at a midwife clinic after her initial hospital stay and they helped her establish breast-feeding successfully. She says it was a very good job that she opted to stay at the clinic as they criticised everything the hospital had done and were quite shocked by their practise of shoving a bottle in the sleeping baby`s mouth. My friend said she hadn`t known any better so if she hadn`t have stayed at the midwife clinic, she would have continued with how the hospital had done things. I said that I probably would have been up there every day trying to help her if that had been the case! LOL! I was happy to know that even professionals agreed with me about their practises being bad as far as establishing BF-ing is concerned!