Prenatal Care Switch

When we first found out I was pregnant, we had one hell of a time trying to find the right prenatal care provider with our HMO (I really wanted a midwife - Why? Click here). I miss the PPO we had in Boston! However, prenatal care is really important so to get started right away, we went with an OB in Livermore who had a reputation for being the go-to guy for natural childbirth in our area. And we learned that there weren't any independent birthing centers within a 50 mile radius, which was a total bummer so unless we wanted a home birth, a hospital was the only option (I'd LOVE to do a home birth, and I'm a good candidate for one, but we're too far from ANY hospital if something were to go wrong quickly). And it seemed in our first search that the midwives around only did home births and weren't covered by insurance.

So, the OB was horrible. He rushed through exams and had absolutely no bedside manner. He practically grunted answers when I asked questions! I was not comfortable with him at all, even though he claimed to have the lowest intervention rates in the hospital. But, being a full time brand new professor, I really didn't have time to do anything about it.

Finally, after a 2 minute office visit in early January, when I had a breather between semesters. I found a midwife who works in a hospital in Berkeley that also staffs additional back-up midwives and seems a lot more amenable to natural birthing than the hospital closer to us. And, after meeting her and seeing her credentials, she's a much better choice for us and for little nugget. She has a relationship with high-risk OBs, who serve as her "backup", which means that I'm actually in better care if something goes wrong than if I had gone with a regular OB. And, in addition to her being a certified nurse midwife (CNM), she's also a nurse practitioner, so she can prescribe medication if necessary.

So, we made the switch midstream, and despite my disappointment about having to birth in a hospital rather than a birth center, we seemed to find an alternative that I can live with, with a care provider who genuinely shares our value of having a natural, unmedicated birth.