Pre-admission checking in

Week 23

Well I have broken my WordPress promise to post every week! Slack Lisa. I don’t know what happened my belly started to grow and fingers stopped typing.

The reason I decided to do a baby blog was a) to keep a record for Baby Key and b) to help other Mums to be by sharing my experiences. So here’s the latest – booking into your hospital.

In my job things often run on a tight timeline. It seems in my personal life I rebel against those timelines and miss all the important dates! A while ago I called up the hospital we decided on to book in. Our Ob assured us there was no hurry, so I took that as no rushing needed at all. I played phone tag with the prenatal department at the hospital and eventually decided to email them to make a booking. The soonest they could do was six weeks out.

So the time came, 8 o’clock after work last Tuesday. I was pretty excited all day – lame I know – we met our booking nurse who was quite nice. She went through all the standard things- sign this form to say you won’t complain if we don’t have a single room, sign this one to say we can charge your health fund etc. Then it got to prenatal classes, which as a first time mum I was pretty keen to do, “Ok, so all the classes are booked up, that end before your due date”. I was basically about to cry. Why would you do that? Not have enough classes for all the people you book in. I pushed and tried to convince her to boot someone else who’d booked in mega early (early nerds). No luck. Do you have Saturday classes. No. I left feeling like I was already failing as a mother. Not the fun visit to the hospital I’d hoped for.

We ended up booking in to a 4 week class starting 2 weeks before our due date. Great. We could however call up and book into breast feeding classes. Classic Lisa, no urgency then drama when it doesn’t work out. The nurse suggested we try another hospital in the area. Part of the reason we’d chosen to go private was to have access to all the hospital services, not to go elsewhere for them.

Anyway, I managed to book us in to another hospital that does the course in one Saturday, which should be fine. It would’ve been nice though to meet other mums going to the same hospital.