My turn, part 1

My turn to haul out the sob stories, I mean.  Aren't we all a bit tired of hearing them from the left for the past four years, and also the eight years before that, and the eight before that as well....

There was something in the newspaper from a week ago Sunday that set me off a bit.  A Hmong woman was telling about how when her mother was admitted to the hospital for COVID, for her first meal the nurses ordered a special meal for her that is the first meal that they serve to Hmong women after they give birth.  After that. her family brought in "culturally-appropriate" meals for her every day.

When I transferred to the hospital with my first baby, after giving birth at home, it was in the wee hours of the morning.  The baby needed some medical observation, nothing too worrisome, and I had lost somewhat more than the usual blood loss--but not so seriously as to need to go to the hospital by myself.

I may or may not have been given a breakfast that morning in the obstetric ward, after being up all night, but at lunch time I was given a tray, and I also had a bunch of doctors coming in and out, and I didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them.  When the tray-collector came around, I told her I wasn't finished with it.  Which you can take as meaning that I had had practically no free time for eating at all, because I'm not a slow eater.

When time was coming on for supper, I remember remarking to the nurses about 6:30 pm that I was looking forward to dinner, because by then I was quite hungry.  Two or three hours later, a nurse came in, found me slumped down (with baby safely tucked in at my side) and despondent, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Starving," I murmured.  Supper had never arrived, and my blood sugar was falling.  My husband had been away dealing with home and things, so I had been alone in the hospital for several hours at least, and not wanting to bother the nurses.

She went away, and came back with a skimpy little sandwich, and an apple.  There may have been a little juice as well.  But that was it--no tray, and no dinner.

I called my husband after I had perked up a little, and told him to BRING REAL FOOD.  He eventually showed up, bringing me a meal from Wendy's--Wendy's, after being up all night and all day giving birth and then being in the hospital.

It may be of interest to some readers to know that my hemoglobin level was 7, and all they did for it was give me some iron pills.

I think we were able to go home the next day, but before that they did a jaundice test on the baby, which led to us returning to the hospital the following day for an even bigger s***show.

This time, the baby was an official patient, as I was not, but they gave me a room to sleep in, and the baby went to the nursery.  We got there in the evening, having had to drive very slowly through crowds from a sporting event who were unsportingly blocking the streets to the hospital, and who may have received some unsporting hand gestures in return. I sat up the whole first night with the baby; apparently one of the effects of higher blood loss while giving birth is that the post-birthing hormones are concentrated within a smaller blood volume, so I felt that this was within my capability, and I wanted to stay with my baby, and bond.  At 6:30 am, however, I was very tired, and went to bed.  At 7 am, while I was still awake, a very loud noise started up outside the window, my boarded-up window.  On a Saturday.  The hospital was building an addition, and just had to have the Giant Jackhammer going right outside what should have been my window, for several hours.  I don't even know when I was able to go to sleep.  I hadn't slept much the night before, either.

As a non-patient, the hospital was not even pretending to feed me, but my husband brought me little meals from the cafeteria, mostly hard-boiled eggs and hot dogs, and at some point my mother-in-law brought in two or three meals' worth of chicken stew, which I was able to refrigerate and microwave.

The baby's medical treatment was an additional s***show, and so was dealing with the rest of the dozen obstacles to breastfeeding that I haven't yet described, but we were able to go home again toward the very end of the third day.

So maybe you can understand now why I am triggered by that newspaper article.  It's no use complaining to the hospital I was at; it closed a couple of years ago.