Highlights of the Birth Experience include:
- Taking public transit to the hospital
- After lots of regular contractions all night shortly after the doctor's office refusing to let me do the 40-week fetal monitor at 39 weeks and 6 days (really?!), I decided to back for my 40-week fetal monitor on a workday, after all. It's not like I was awake enough to go to work. The combination of exhaustion and the occasional contraction meant that I took the bus to the doctor's office instead of driving. Thus, when the doctor sent me to the hospital because he didn't like the fetal monitor results, I happily took the train. I wanted to go to the hospital, because I didn't know whether or not I was in labor. I didn't want to drive, because I was tired. And I love trains. Riding trains, especially not during rush hour, is very relaxing. And I didn't have to worry about the weird monitor result, because the doctor said there was nothing to worry about. And with so little sleep the night before, it was hours later before I realized that being told, "I'm sending you to the hospital, but don't worry," means it's definitely time to worry. Luckily, by then the hospital staff had long-since repeated the fetal monitoring and assured me that there really wasn't anything to worry about. Then again, this is the same hospital staff that told me not to worry my little head about the epidural machine beeping... Ha! About that, I really should have worried. (They fixed it very quickly once we realized it wasn't working, but that little interlude was not fun at all.)
- One triage nurse
- Seriously. When I got to intake at the maternity ward, I had to wait for three other people to see the triage nurse before it was my turn. Each new couple that came in after me looked just as taken aback as I had when they realized that yes, there was totally a line to get triaged.
- Being asked if I was in the mood to give birth
- Granted, she was being cute (I'm reasonably certain she would have strongly encouraged me to reconsider had I answered in the negative), but when I finally got my first physical exam of the day (after having told at least 4-5 medical professionals that I'd had regular contractions all night), the admitting midwife gave me the results by asking, "?בא לך ללדת היום" ["Do you feel like giving birth today?"]
- Davening/Shmiras Shabbos!
- As a religious Jew, I really enjoyed giving birth in a religious Jewish hospital. When I gave birth to BSM in America, my nurse and doctor were both religious Jews, but there's something really special in being with complete strangers during an intense time and realizing that you share a huge set of assumptions. The midwives didn't just tolerate my spontaneous prayer during labor, they chimed in. I didn't have to explain that I couldn't really leave on Saturday: the hospital doesn't do discharges on Shabbos. They also put the lights on a timer for Shabbos. And have someone make kiddush and havdala. And explain about the specially-designed call button (a.k.a. "gramma switch") that makes it totally okay for patients to call the nurse. Suddenly, I understand all of those awkward Christian-y moments in America very differently: I always felt like someone else was foisting their religious beliefs on me, but now I think they were just communicating on what they thought was a shared wavelength. Which is beautiful when it works out.
- New ID papers
- Living in the West Bank has its perks (namely affordable housing and gorgeous views), but the perk that people don't talk about nearly enough is the local branch for the Ministry of the Interior. This is supposed to be the Office to end all Offices, the peak of the hell that is Israeli Bureaucracy. Not in the West Bank, it isn't! Having forgotten to check the hours before I left the house, I arrived at the local branch two minutes before closing. Not only did the ladies working there let me in, but they let me in with a smile. I gave the lady the temporary birth certificate from the hospital (speaking of which, Israel assumes that babies aren't named immediately, so the hospital-issued birth certificate has a line for the kid's name that parents fill in all by themselves: no mess, no fuss) and the addenda from our ID papers, and the lady took them and told me the permanent birth certificate and new addenda will show up in the mail. Oh, and would we like new holders for our ID cards? Dude, I did not know that you could just get new little holders instead of wrapping the old ones with duct tape. What a great baby gift! Funnily enough, you have to surrender your old dinky plastic holder to get a new one, though. Hopefully this is not to deter counterfeiting: presumably the Israeli government knows that one can order dinky plastic card holders from China without too much trouble...
