Childbirth

Carol Burnett said it: giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head. Here are some statistics from an online poll done by Self.com  in answer to the question, “If you could choose, what would be your ideal way to give birth?”

• 52% said they’d like to give birth in a hospital with an obstetrician,
• 25% said in a hospital with an obstetrician assisted by a midwife or doula, a doula being a person like a midwife who  helps you cut back on the cussing and teaches you deceptive terms  like the one that calls a contraction a ‘surge,’
• 13%  would like to give birth at home with a midwife, and..
• 10% would opt for a cesarean  and all the knockout meds you got back there doc.

Self also looks back to what it calls ‘the Betty Draper generation’ when American women were heavily sedated during labor and delivery. Doctors used a drug called Scopolamine that erased the memory of pain even though you sure enough went through the pain. It was what they call an amnesiac and they still have amnesiacs which they use for colonoscopies.My sister Nan had a colonoscopy that turned out to perforate the wall of her colon. They had to repeat the procedure after the two months it took her body to heal, and taht second time used pediatric instruments for her very-short torso (that's how Nan is built: very long legs; a very short torso.) Anyway when she went to sit down with the doctor after the first procedure and before the second, the guy stepped out of the room for a second. At that point Nan, in typical Nan fashion, reached across the desk, spun the chart around quick and read the note the guy made after that first painful attempt. “Stronger than appears,” it said.Now, for a really great five minutes, here’s Bill Cosby on what it’s like to be the daddy in the birthing room:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOP52g_rO24&feature=related]