Respect for OBs...

This was originally posted on my old blog on May 5, 2010.

I'm sure you are all familiar with the brain fog that coincides with the last few weeks of pregnancy and how exciting it is when it lifts even if only for a few minutes. :-) I had one of those moments this morning while responding to a post on BBC forums and I wanted to share.

The title of the post was "New respect for my OB". (Oh come on, you knew I'd have to respond to THAT.) The poster just had her 36 wk appt and her OB was talking about the 5 successful VBACs he had the previous week. Good for him, I'm glad he does them. He went on to tell her that he has to be immediately available for VBACs and exactly what that meant (that he be in the hospital the entire time the patient is in labor in the hospital). He went on to tell her that he lost $3000 because he had to cancel 2 days of appointments because of all these VBACs. "And he just does it because it's the right thing to do. He did say that its getting to the point where he is going to have to limit the number of VBACs that he accepts because its just too much and he doesn't want his wife getting out the divorce papers." She went on to say that she's sooooo happy to have found such a good doc and suggested that ins cos should provide incentives to docs who do VBACs, etc. All the responses that she got were yay, cool, good for you, etc.

Here's what I posted:

"Immediately available is an ACOG rule, which many hospitals/OBs use as an excuse to have VBAC bans. I think it was bad form, however, for him to try to elicit sympathy from you by telling you how much money he lost last week by having "so" many VBACs. If ACOG would encourage OBs to lower the primary c-section rate they wouldn't have so many VBACs to worry about.

And finally, I can understand the wife of an OB getting frustrated because of the amount of time that he spends away from the family, but that is his freaking job. If he already was an OB when they got married, she knew before she married him. If he decided to go to school while they were married, I'm sure they had many discussions about his future schedule. As a student midwife, I've already had many conversations with my husband about the fact that I might be gone for days at a time, might have to leave in the middle of sex, dinner, birthday parties, we might have to drive separately if we are going somewhere and I have a mom that's due. It's part of the job and you have to prepare yourself and your family for it. If you don't it's your own damn fault and if you do and then they get resentful either they didn't fully understand or they don't get the importance of what you're doing.

Sorry - overdue and getting pissy here. I just get tired of the OBs "Oh poor me" attitude because of what their trade union (ACOG) makes them do. If they don't like it they should leave the union or fight for changes in policy. *sigh*"