My Story: Deciding to Give Birth in a Hospital

MS mentions how her trust in Western medicine influenced her decision to give birth in a hospital.

Transcript: 

OBOS TODAY: Yeah. Did you ever consider, like or like what contributed to your decision to have to give birth in a hospital, as opposed to somewhere else? 

 MS: I’m, I’m pretty traditional, I think, and I learned a lot. You know you learn a lot about yourself when you sort of have, you know, learn a major event like being pregnant having children or, um, it’s funny, even with COVID, you know, and sort of listening to the way people talk about the vaccine, I’ve one thing I’ve learned about myself is, I really do trust Western medicine, I really do trust, you know, the sort of medical professionals, and I felt totally comfortable going to this hospital. I also really trusted this hospital. So, I mentioned it’s a, it’s a hospital affiliated with the university, it was a university where I’d gone to school where I’d been working for many, many years. I knew lots of people who worked at the hospital, and, and I’d been with the doctors who my OB practice for, for, a while and I just I just had a lot of trust in the system, and so it didn’t occur to me not to go. 

And, I also, it didn’t occur to me, like I mean there were definitely books I read and people I talked to who said, you know I’m not going to get an epidural or I want to you know give birth at home or something like that, and I just felt like I was perfectly fine doing what my doctors recommended, and I had a lot of confidence in them. I had a lot of confidence that if anything went wrong, that they would immediately have all the equipment and all of the experts that they needed to, to handle it, and the truth was, after the twins were born, even though the delivery was very smooth, I did have quite a lot of bleeding afterwards, probably like, like several hours afterwards I suddenly lost like a ton of blood and I almost passed out, and I was very happy at that point that I was in the hospital and that they could get my doctor there. It must have been like the next day because it was actually a different doctor, like within minutes was there and was able to, like, figure out exactly what to do and, and take care of it. I think if I’d been at home and that had happened, it would have been really scary because I don’t feel, well I know my husband wouldn’t have known what to do, it would have really been, it would have really been hard, so I guess, for me, I felt more comfortable being in a, in a big hospital.