It hurts. By the way. It really, REALLY hurts. But its all worth it in the end. I don't know if that helps.

NHS Choices Blogs - now I really have seen it all.

Mad, bad and dangerous with your hard earned cash. Yes the NHS "Choices" website, which has squandered 80 million pounds of your hard earned cash on its piss-poor interface has really come up trumps this time. Not only does this government white elephant have a search facility so utterly appalling that it returned zero hits in a search for "prostate cance" (only the commonest male cancer in the UK - I mean, you wouldn't want to optimise your search engine for the sake of one little missing letter now would you?) but I have also just stumbled upon THIS blog which really has made my blood boil**.

**NB following a complaint by me to the NHS choices website team, a disclaimer has appeared on the blog. Hurrah! A mini-victory for the little man!

I literally did stumble across it (in the virtual sense, rather than the literally literal sense) as a click from a google search, in which I was trying to find out the advisability (or not) of using Day Nurse to treat my stinking third trimester cold. There is no disclaimer that I can see on this blog, and, in fact, not even a clue as to whether it is written buy a real person or is supposed to be some kind of fictional infommercial type blog. Fictional blogs are being used more and more in the sphere of healthcare and education. Indeed there is a not-bad one called Emma's Diary which is backed by the Royal College of General Practioners. The one on the NHS Choices website however seems to be by a real person called Alexis Green, although there is no way of telling, even from the NHS choices Blogging front page - who and what is real and what is not.

Unfortunately the content of Alexis's blog has made me really angry. If she is for real, then the site should have a fuck-off big disclaimer saying that is it not official NHS or medical opinion
. If (worse), it is supposed to be a "fictional" account for "information" or education, then frankly, its creator should be sacked forthwith. Why? For including this list of the supposed pros and cons of natural childbirth vs C-section

Natural birth pros

Are there any?

If labour and baby ok you can go home after 6 hours

Recovery usually faster

Cons

Labour could take hours or even days

No guarantee of pain relief working

Could tear

c-section pros

You know when you are going to have your baby

With luck you should be awake to hold baby straight away

No horrendous long painful labour

Lots of pain killers after

c-section cons

You have to stay in hospital for 3 days

You get a scar

No lifting for 6 weeks which could be a problem with a clingy toddler

For a start, they should be shot for including a line like "natural childbirth: pros - are there any?". How about, er, its how it is supposed to be? Assuming medical intervention is not required for a pre-existing risk or problem, and that none arise during birth, childbirth, lets not forget, is a perfetly natural process.

Secondly, they should be strung up and hung out to dry for their failure to mention the following about C-section:

a) It carries a three times greater risk of maternal mortality than natural childbirth
b) that it carries an increased risk of a host of complications in subsequent pregnancies and childbirth. These include, but are by no means limited to, uterine rupture, preterm birth, low birth weight and stillbirth. There is of course the prolonged stay in hospital with an open wound which will increase the risk to the mother of contracting MRSA or any of the other lovely superpbugs which seem to proliferate in even the "best" hospitals.
c) it is a serious surgical intervention which, when performed unnecessarily, introduces risks and complications which would otherwise not exist.

Thesed are just for starters - I could go on all day about the specifics of the pros and cons, but that isn't really the point. The point is that a blog of this kind of ill-informed opinion has no place on a publicly funded web-site, the purpose of which is supposed to be education and patient empowerment. Sort it out NHS! PFFFT!

self abuse vs having fun

I received a lovely email from someone who, (I am sure) is a very caring, well-meaning member of society, warning me that what I have been writing about amounts to self-abuse. Now, I have a problem with this term (but then of course, anyone who has a problem with drinking and drug taking is probably going to re-define what I would call the personal choice to do what I like to my body, as self-abuse.)

I know all about self-abuse. The reasons there is a massive gap in the posts on this blog between June and August this year was because a family member died after an accident which was partly related to substance abuse. I am sure this would give any nay-sayers all the evidence they think they need to murmur about famial links and denial, and disregard anything I have to say for myself. In my defence, and as you know, attack is the best form of it, I am phenomenally well read on the subject, and here is what I have to say:

Until we stop pretending that it isn't fun, those people who enjoy smoking, drinking and getting intoxicated on illegal drugs and address the issue of how to replace the need or desire for that fun in people's lives, we are going to get no where.

I have been pregnant for 7 months. In that time I have not touched a cigarette or an illegal substance of any kind. I have continued to drink at a very low level, according to the DoH guidelines as they were when I became pregnant (one or two drinks, once or twice a week). I hardly think this is the action of an irresponsible parent who needs to hot foot it down to AA confess my sins and pledge to give it all up for the rest of my life because I am "powerless against it"

But my biggest problem is the battleground that my body has become because I have had the audacity to get pregnant. It is no longer mine to choose whether I drink, or smoke or eat soft cheese, whether I do that in a well-read, intelligent way to minimise the risks or not. Everyone from other scientists like Prof Sharpe (see previous post), to politicians like Dr Harry Burns (Scotland's Chief Medical Officer) would have it that as a mother my needs and wants and desires cease to exist in the presence of a baby-carrying bump. The worst offenders, as far as I am concerned however, are the other women. The ones who tutt, and judge and cluck about my "selfishness", as if they themselves had been sent from on-high to be the only infallible incubators and perfect producers of babies on this sullen earth.

The fact that we have forgotten that we are women first and mothers second seems to have been overlooked.

Maternity Nazis Get my Goat!

So, splashed all over the front page of this morning's free newspaper - following from a BBC report yesterday, Professor Richard Sharpe Medical Research Council's Human Reproductive Sciences Unit, based in Edinburgh has decided that henceforth (and I do paraphrase) we are all terrible mothers (to be) if we do not stop applying all perfumed cosmetics to our skin, despite the fact that, in his own words - they have no hard evidence to come to this conclusion. I quote "It is not because we have evidence that these chemicals categorically cause harm to babies, it is only based on experimental studies on animals that suggest it is a possibility."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7590641.stm

Now much as I appreciate his concern, the fact that this as yet non-evidence has made it to the front pages of the national newspapers, so far as I can make out, before it has even been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal just adds to the scare-mongering nonsense that pregnant women are supposed to absorb if they are to be deemed good mothers. As he says

"If you are planning to become pregnant you should change your lifestyle. Those lifestyle things don't necessarily mean that you are going to cause terrible harm to your baby, but by avoiding them you are going to have a positive effect." Really? What positive effect? They have no bloody evidence of any definite effect in humans. Could I be so bold, perhaps, however to suggest that Prof Sharpe will be more likely to attract some lovely funding now that his blunderbuss attempts to give advice have hit the front page? Hmmmmm. More on this later.

alcohol - the final frontier

I did think it was a big joke - the very same week that I discover I am pregnant the government decides to update its thinking on alcohol and safety in pegnant women. And this time its war. I confess to being a big drinker. I enjoy alcohol. My lively social life revolves around it, and if everyone I know hasn't guessed that I am up the duff within minutes of meeting me because to refuse a drink is virtually unknown of when I am around then I'll eat my own baby's cradlecap.

I mean it was bad enough before when the general feeling was that a glass of wine here or there would be unlikely to do any damage but that the maternity nazis were on the prowl anyway for any woman who looked like she might be enjoying herself during pregnancy, but even the government has finally succumbed to their pressure now. Yes, on the basis of no new evidence whatsoever, the government has downgraded its recommended safe amount of alcohol to drink during pregnancy to none. Nada. Zilch. Zero. I'm afraid i am not going to take this information lying down. In much the same way as you could protect your unborn foetus from being killed as a result of seatbelt trauma by never wearing a seatbelt, or better still, never getting in a car, there are levels of risk avoidance which become ridiculous, especially when they are based on weak, or worse, no evidence. So for the sanity and well being of normal women everywhere, I am off to uncover what the evidence actually is for the dangers of drinking alcohol during pregnancy, and when I have found it I'll report back here. Cheers!

Which one of you can't count?

So as a first timer in this baby-making game (or should that be a gamete, ho ho ho), I have just discovered the weird and wonderful method by which doctors and midwives the world over, count the length of pregnancy. In case you were not aware (and I wasn't until a few days ago) its 38 weeks. Three - eight. However, apparently, 38 was just too difficult a number to cope with, so they "just rounded it" up. To 40 weeks.

How ridiculous! I don't know if it was the doctors or the midwives who decided we were too thick to count in 38's but someone obviously has. You may have spotted the obvious flaw in this rounding up plan as well. if a real pregnancy lasts 38 weeks, but everyone in the medical establishment wants to say its 40 weeks long, where do the extra two weeks come from? Well whoever decided on thids 40 week rule, in their infinite wisdom, decided that counting back was the best plan.
The beginning of a pregnancy is timed, not from the day or moment of conception when the sperm meets and fertilises the egg, but from the date of the first day of your last period, when your body started getting ready to potentially become pregnant.

So, get this. For two weeks before you are pregnant, you are still counted as pregnant. Theoretically, this means that every single menstruating woman in the world is technically pregnant for the first two weeks of her period. Yes, I know its crazy, but there you are. I wonder if that means that every menstruating woman in britain can claim free dentistry on the NHS for the first two weeks of every month?

Can I have a pee please Bob?

Well that was one side-effect I didn't expect quite so early on. In fact, before I'd even done my first pregnancy test (one week after my period was due) I had already started peeing for England, Scotland and Wales. Dammit I seemed to be emptying my bladder on behalf of the entire damn sovereignty. Not only that but self-same bladder seemed to have shrunk to the size of a thimble, so it was literally a case of one glass in, one glass out. Big daddy thought this was hilarious (right up until the three time a night toilet trips started waking him up at which point it became less of a joke and more of a nuisance).

I have to say that despite seven years of higher education in the biological field, my recollection of the physiology of pregnancy was rusty at best and I couldn't understand why such a profound change could happen quite so early on. I had assumed that the whole "uterus pressing on the bladder" shenanigan wouldn 't have an effect until much further down the line when it was actually growing to accomodate an embryo of some significant size, as opposed to a tiny mass of cells that you would have to magnify a hundred times just to visualise. Like this blob here. That's all it really is at this stage. A blob. And a small one at that. That is making me pee like the Trevi Fountain.

Anyhoo it turns out that even at this early doors, two weeks past conception date, the mere act of implantation sets in motion a train of events which begins by making your uterus swell enough (even in the first week) to make you piss a lot, and ends in an 18 year fiscal duty of care to the parasite that will inhabit your body for the best part of the next year, with a brief punctation point nine months in to cause you tremendous amounts of pain. Mother Nature sure has a sense of humour.