August 30, 2007 - What's in a name?

Time for a hospital rant!

I have much more respect for nurses than doctors. For a fraction of the pay they get all the dirty jobs, and spend much more time with the patients. Unfortunately, they're still part of the great American health care system that cares more about pharmacies and malpractice suits than about the individual needs of patients, so it's no surprise that we earned a bit of a reputation at the hospital during our three day stay.

Thankfully in NH it's not mandatory to get the eye drops and vitamin K shot, we just had to sign a form. They were also good about letting us keep Simon in the room instead of alone in the nursery, even though it meant being woken up every couple hours so they could poke him. I was also able to sleep in the room, thanks to a foldout chair. They were also cool with our midwife, Jeanne, going through the medical records and providing us with opinions.

Of the several doctors who visited none stayed more than a couple of minutes and only one of them actually approved of our hippy choices, but she made sure to only mention that when others were out of earshot.

Actually, probably the greatest source of amusement for them was the fact that it took us three days to come up with a name. For some reason we were convinced we were going to have a girl so we were caught unawares. Probably the main reason we expected a girl was because we couldn't agree on a boy's name so put it off too long.