(no subject)

Er, is it just me or is it absolutely ridiculous that not every hospital in Ireland has a website? I know damn well from working in enough of them that things like visiting hours are not standard. That they can be bloody sprawled out things, and so a map of the buildings might also be useful to someone who is not there every day. That transport information just might be handy. Hell, information on where the hospital actually is, that's also a huge help.

This post was brought to you at this hour by me trying to organise a week/fortnight placement for next year. Maybe for October, maybe December. Maybe even August/September if I can get things organised really quickly. If I'm extra quick and get it sorted for Aug/Sept then I don't have to worry about public liability insurance running out on me halfway through.

Options I'm looking into are either the midwife led unit in the Lourdes (20 minutes saunter from my house!) or one of the independent midwives, er, somewhere. A lot more poking is required of the latter, though chance to be at a homebirth! Even if it is _strictly observation_ this time round. Poop. Wanna catch a baby! No opportunities for that next year, unless one of my women in outpatients gets a bit too excited. And yes, I know I used the p word there, but that's what the department's called.

Once the leg's working I'll pop up to the MLU, see if I can have a chat with someone up there. Know a couple of the midwives up there anyway so with any luck... Was contemplating Cark, cos there's some interesting stuff out there and it'd be nice to get some more DOMINO under my belt (domiciliary in and out - most of the antenatal and postnatal care is done in the home, coming in to hospital just to birth.)

There's very little in the works as regards training/conferences at the minute which saddens me. Still very very annoyed at missing the ICM but it would have been a very spendy few days. There is a day course on the new Sands guidelines in September, but I don't think that would be a particularly good use of my time, energy and money. Not right now. Maybe next time. The internet says I'm not on placement when the TCD one is on (1st week in November.) I do hope it stays like that.

Birth tech

Pregnancy is not an illness.
Birth is not a disease.

Now I've got that out of the way... Recently I was linked to something that made me goggle more than usual. So much so I had to check that I wasn't hallucinating. It's the BirthTrack. A device designed to save women from those nasty midwives and their horrid hands.

At the minute we're completely backward here - we've to use fingers, ewwww!, to see how a cervix is dilating. Wouldn't it be so much better to have a machine tell us instead? Because machines are great at deciding if a woman's insides are stretchy, or well-effaced, or if the cervix is still posterior. And you get to watch a monitor the whole time! So no more of this uncertainty of 4-5cm of a dilated cervix, you'll know if it's 4 or if it's 5! Wow! And so will your partner! Instead of helping with your needs, look, another shiny med monitor to look at and become obsessed with.

And as for deciding if the baby's head is dropping (it has to be a head, all babies who don't turn are booked for sections, right? No-one could ever manage pushing a breech babby out!) well we'll just stick a probe in its head so we can tell! And it'll mean we can tell exactly what the heartbeat's like because we've screwed a probe into the baby's head. Very nicely giving baby his first ever scar! Who doesn't love a good scar story? "I'm so tough, I've got scars from when I was born!"

While we're at it, let's give 4 nice routes of ascending infection! Membranes have to be ruptured (one! ha ha ha!) so we can stick a probe into the baby (two! ha ha ha!) and attach clips onto the cervix (three and four, ha ha ha!) Of course, it's only to be expected that some reduction in mobility will happen, but at least you don't have those pesky midwives at you with their fingers!