Arrived early and changed into the green scrubs, then picked up my post-partum patient. Unfortunately, I have nothing to say. It was a completely uneventful day and perfect, boring patient who I can't say anything about because it would surely identify her in our community.
I was hoping to spend some time in the nursery holding and feeding newborns, but no such luck.
At the end of the day, one of our resident lactation consultants showed us part of a video by Christina Smillie, MD, about her breastfeeding method, which is to wait for the infant to move into position and root around for the nipple on its own. I'm not entirely sure what the point of this method is except that it's "more natural." The video has almost no explanation on it, just shots of babies latching on by themselves. Lots of breasts. In particular, there is one quite attractive women with really luxurious, large-nippled breasts who throws her head back and laughs when her baby latches. They play that snippet over and over (you know what I'm talking about if you've seen the video). I'm sorry, but in this whole reproductive milieu I just have an extremely hard time de-sexualizing the women. My experience of the "patients" in maternity is quite different from the female patients who are in for surgery, illness, etc. Oh well, no interest in working in maternity, so no ethical conflict.
We also saw a video on odd Mexican birthing assistive techniques using a large scarf. I don't remember what it's called, and I'm not interested enough to search around the web for it. A short search already turned up the website of a doula who insists on classifying herself as a pro-choice, lesbian, latina, progressive gender non-conformist. Gaggk! These are the types militant feminists I was expecting to find swarming around the maternity ward. Actually, it hasn't been that bad, but then you never know what the nurses are thinking about those nasty fathers...
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