Monday, May 5, 2014

oh readers

I've nothing to tell you.

Sensory dramas, Autism dramas, storms in a very weird tea cup. In the last week though, I've been able to help two different people identify Asperger's and Sensory Processing disorder in their children, and offer some support and info, if not real advice about how to handle it. This is a good thing at least. One in fifty kids, they reckon now. A 30% increase in the last two years. Don't tell me that's just improved diagnosis. Something ain't right.

Anyway... I went to the Home Birth conference with lovely Eva yesterday. Met some lovely facebook people, won a box of chocolates, I've just discovered, from Neighbourhood Midwives. How nice! I sort of have an over abundance of chocolate right now - a box from my bday still on the shelf, Easter egg, and now this... still. Nice to have. Chocs in the post, woo!

I saw beautiful birth videos there, shown by Dr. Amali Locugamage, an obstetrician who had a home birth and recognises the need for it, and better birth practices in hospitals. She showed the videos she replaced the teaching course one with, and man... they were amazing. An orgasmic birth in an outdoor pool in Hawaii I've posted here before long ago, two water births where the babies just swam out, a twin birth where the babies went pop! pop! though the second one was breach... caught by the father and popped up onto the mother's chest... so lovely. So EASY. Why shouldn't it be like that? Last speaker was Declan Keane, another obstetritian who started the Community Midwives group in the National Maternity Hospital, and stated, clearly, that our Caesarian levels have reached crisis proportions. It's in the paper today... this is a good development (the statement and the reporting, not the crisis).

This is Dr. Locugamage. She showed this clip. A lovely woman, very nice way about her.



It makes me sad that the only people who get to see births like these - calm, happy ones, where the mother is in charge, for the most part, she's the one directing the action, along with the baby. The father catches the baby and the midwife is just ... there... waiting til she's needed. We home birthers see these beautiful images, so affirmative of women's abilities and the magic and beauty of gentle birth. But the people who need to understand how birth can be are the ones who only see birth as represented in film and on tv and in the papers - they believe in the rush, the panic, the screaming, the lack of control, the desperation for drugs and the Doctor as God. They believe in the story that birth is an unbearable necessity, to be numbed with drugs, that it's easier to have a baby cut out of you, taken away to be weighed and cleaned and saved by the doctors. Thank god we were in the hospital, considering how it went... birth is a crisis, a disaster to be saved from. They don't want to watch what it can be, because they then believe that that was how it had to be, for them. How it will have to be for their daughters. And tragically, in the main, it's just not true. But they need to think it is, so they can't risk a peep at a different view.

 In other news, the dog escaped and chased and caught a cat yesterday. That was not good. I grabbed the dog and the cat got away. He ran through the hedge after it and my poor neighbours who I don't know let me go through their gate to get him. His notoriety precedes him, I see... man said 'Derry ran away again?' with a grin. Hope the cat's ok. My dog is a killer. He was not deterred by the cat fighting back. My friend  who's worried her cat might hurt him does not know the Ways of the Terrier.

What else? Not a lot. What about you, silent readers?




6 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

We certainly share this belief in home birth, you and I. I am so fortunate to have had three good ones. I honest-to-god think that they're going to discover a link between autism and the large number of ultrasounds they do before birth these days. I just keep wondering why no one has really studied this.
But of course, that may not be true at all.

Jo said...


I think something is definitely going to come out of ultrasounds soon. I don't know if it'll be autism; I suspect that comes down to toxins and recent interesting research on Vit D and EFA deficiency as well as other environmental factors and hereditary factors. Huge amounts of gut stuff too. So, Ultrasound, who knows. Time will tell... or perhaps it won't, if the wrong people are invested in it...

One way or the other, I think research is not enough... I was happy to wait til later to get my scan, am also happy that the Irish health system is cutting costs by doing routine scans later!

Sabine said...

Thanks for these lovely stories about home birth. I had my baby at home in Cork in 1982. There was a large group of women having home births at the time and we had a small panel of free lance midwives and a great doctor supporting us. Unfortunately, the hospitals were hostile to put it mildly.

As for autism, have you read about this here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/antidepressant-use-in-pregnancy-linked-to-autism-risk-in-boys/

Jo said...

Urg. That's a tough one :(

Cork has become a bit of a haven for home birth these days though, no? The HSE here are so incredibly hostile to it in the East - I thought everyone in Cork was working together now?

These are dark times, though. The Witchhunting is back. I wonder will we come out the other side or not?

Sabine said...

It's been years, no decades or in fact half an eternity since I've been to Cork but at the time, in the 80s, we were all wild and mad. HSE? We didn't even have a medical card. The midwife got 50 quid, the doctor got a little walnut tree and a day's help with his front garden.
The witchhunting was big then, but we were a big crowd of witches. For a while.

Jo said...

Fantastic :) Times have certainly changed...