The tadpole is growing

I'm still growing this tadpole in my belly. According to thebump.com, it's about as big as a lemon from head to rump right now. Last week thebump.com said baby was as big as a peach. I would have thought peaches are bigger than lemons. Hopefully baby isn't shrinking.

We never had any babies in America, so we can't really compare maternity care here to maternity care there. But we can share what it's like here.

One thing we're pretty sure is different here is that not everyone has an obstetrician involved. Everyone has a Lead Maternity Carer ("LMC") which can either be your general practitioner, a midwife, or an obstetrician. Most women use a midwife. That's what we're doing. Our midwife is Sheena.

The national health care system pays for all maternity care. As legal residents of New Zealand, we get the free care. We don't even have private insurance and really don't need it. The national health care takes care of all antenatal care, all hospital costs, and for any specialist care if we run into complications. There are only a couple exceptions. One exception is ultrasound scans. I have no idea why these are excepted. It's not a huge fee though - we paid $50 for our 8-week scan. We'll pay $50 again for the 20-week scan. Lots of people do 12-week scans as well (presumably another $50) but we decided not to do that one.

The other exception is if you choose an obstetrician as your LMC. An obstetrician is a "specialist" and the NZ public health system only pays for specialist care where there is a medical need. The view here is that pregnancy is a normal state of being, not a medical emergency. Specialist care is only necessary where complications arise. Normal pregnancies are well within the skill set of a midwife or GP. If there are complications, the midwife or GP will refer the woman to a specialist. In that case, where there's a medical need, the public health system pays for the care. If you have an obstetrician as your LMC just because you want one, you will have to pay out-of-pocket.

So our LMC is Sheena the midwife. We are registered with her and the government pays her to take care of us from the first sign of pregnancy right through until our baby turns 6 weeks old. If for any reason we decide Sheena is no longer da bomb (she's awesome, we can't imagine this happening) then we can fire her and sign up with someone else.

Sheena has visited us at home every 4 weeks for the early part of the pregnancy. Visits will speed up as baby gets bigger and we get closer to D-Day.

It's incredible having the care provider come to see me at home. I've never experienced it before. Whenever I've needed medical care, I've had to go to the doctor, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and wait. And they're never on time, are they? Doctors always make you wait.

But the midwife comes to us. And it's excellent. In week 11 we had a scare - I had some bleeding. I called Sheena on her cell phone and she was here at the house 15 minutes later. Amazing! This alone makes having a midwife better than having a doctor, in my mind. It was so nice not to deal with the hospital or a doctor's office (more likely a hospital, as it was after hours). No waiting room or sick people or hospital forms. I just laid on my couch and put on relaxing music.

Thank goodness it all turned out to be fine. We could hear baby's heartbeat on doppler - what a relief! The little mcnugget seems to be hanging on alright. I'm still getting nausea and I'm definitely getting fatter everyday, so I guess that's a good sign.

We will have to choose where to give birth. There are 5 hospitals in Christchurch, some public and some private. We can pick any of them and the public health system will pay the tab. Just one of them, Christchurch Women's, is a 'tertiary care' hospital, which means it's got all the technology that anyone might need to get baby out. That's where you go if you need a Cesarean section, or if you want an epidural. But anyone can choose to give birth there, say, if you want the technology near by 'just in case.' We are not planning to go to Christchurch Women's but of course, things don't always go according to plan. The other hospitals are secondary care units, I think.

At the other end of the spectrum, we could give birth at home. This option is holding the most appeal for us right now. Home birth is not terribly common here, but not as frowned on here as maybe it is the U.S. There was one woman in our early pregnancy class (out of about 12) who was planning to birth at home. Our midwife is a big advocate for home birth. If a problem arose, we could transfer to hospital pretty quickly (it's probably 15 minutes away by car). But we haven't made any decisions yet. All options are still on the table.