Too Much Information

Gentle Caution: This post might contain too much information. I am going to detail my first hospital visit in the UK for a prenatal (henceforth known as antenatal) appointment. You know we all go through this stuff and I don’t think it is anything too touchy but it was too funny not to include and just too real life in general. I have delayed posting this simply because it was going to be a long one and I needed time to digest everything that occurred in the past couple of days. Plus, Thursday night I got to talk on Skype to my Mom which meant I was up until 1:45 at which point it was already Friday so “I” (read: Trey) decided to sleep instead of update.

Also, if you just want to read the really weird part, it is the one called “The Blood Work”

On Thursday, September 3rd I awoke excited for our first doctor’s appointment. It was at the hospital where I would give birth and I had yet to physically locate it although I had Google-street-viewed it several times from home before we moved. The hospital was about a mile away from my home so naturally we looked up how to get there on the tube or bus because surely pregnant women don’t walk to the doctor, right? Taking public transportation would require walking a block to the tube, walking down a flight of stairs, standing waiting up to 10 minutes on your train, taking the tube one stop, exiting the station by going up two flights of stairs, walking two blocks to stand and wait up to 10 minutes on a bus, riding a bus two stops and walking a block the rest of the way to the hospital. Estimated travel time: 45 minutes. So the day of the appointment we got ready, ate a rushed breakfast and headed off on our first ever walk to the doctor. We left at 9:25 for our 9:40 AM appointment. We barely made our 15 minute mile all the way back to the doors of the antenatal clinic.

THE HOSPITAL: was in some ways very similar to the hospitals we are used to. You walked into a huge open space with a reception desk and as we walked to the antenatal clinic we passed a drink and snack stand, a coffee shop, places to sit and wait or meet for lunch and large escalators that ran to the upper floors. There was tons of light flooding in and there were huge sculptures and artwork on the walls. It was a similar feeling to walking into the grocery stores here. It looked the same at first glance but as you got closer everything was just a little different. Things just look a little more organic and not quite as shiny, catchy and new. We turned into the clinic and went straight to the reception desk. We were supposed to arrive 10 minutes early and had actually arrived at the scheduled time of our appointment. I apologized for this and was told not to be silly then asked for my records. I handed the man at the desk a copy of my records from the U.S. as well as copies of our hospital registration forms. Registration forms include copies of a passport, visa, and a utility bill proving that you reside in the area for the hospital you are claiming you are zoned to. We don’t pay our utility bill, our employer does, so they allowed us to present a bill with their name and a letter from them stating that we did live at the address and the bills were paid by said employer. You have to provide this because you are zoned to a hospital the same way you are zoned to public school in the U.S. and people try to be sneaky if they don’t want to give birth or be treated at a particular hospital. Upon being presented with these documents the reception clerk looked at me like I was from Mars. He said “don’t you have a [sheeshenslobben]”? (Omitted because I still have no comprehension of the word he used to describe my U.K. records.) I replied that the midwife had said she would send something over and we had just moved here a week ago so it was our first time to hospital. A light bulb went off and he reached over to a cart and handed me a copy of my records then sent me to the waiting room immediately behind us. (Note for later in the blood work section of this post that I alerted him my name was wrong on the records. They had my maiden name. He replied by saying “O.K.”)

THE DOCTOR: We waited with about 10 other women many of whom were there just to have blood drawn and eventually a tall blond woman in plain clothes with an American accent called me back to the exam room where my consultant “specialist” (at least that is who I think she was, she might have been a Physician Assistant or a doctor on the consultant team but not the main consultant because she kept referencing the consultant…) was waiting. She was a shorter blond that looked about 30. Both women would have looked more appropriate on T.V. than an exam room. They sat facing a long desk pushed up against a wall. We sat next to the desk with our backs to the wall facing an exam table and curtain that shielded the patient who was being examined from the door with the window. It was a slight bit smaller than exam rooms in the U.S. but felt quite a bit smaller with four people in there. They began by asking what my doctors in the states had told me about what to expect with a twin pregnancy. I described briefly the complications they said I might expect then the U.K. doctor went into detailed every complication I had read about. They called them by different names such as In Uterine Growth Restriction vs. In Uterine Growth Retardation, and how they would test for them throughout the pregnancy. It was all information I had heard before. They then felt around my tummy and sent me to take a urine test.

THE URIN TEST: OK, here is where things started getting a bit… different. First of all they handed me a vial, not cup because it was about twice the size of a vial one’s blood goes into and sent me off to the bathroom. Once inside I looked everywhere for the permanent marker to write my name on it but there was not one to be found. I also looked and tried lots of knobs looking for the holder where the magic lab elves takes your sample, process it, and send you your results a week later. There was no such receptacle. (As a side note, you should know that the toilets here even at the hospital are a good foot shorter in the length of the seat than the ones at the hospitals in the U.S.) So I took my vial, acquisitioned my sample and, having nothing else to do with it, wrapped it in paper towels, washed my hands and carried it out of the bathroom, down the corridor with all the patient rooms back to the room where my doctor, my doctor’s student and my husband were sitting. I awkwardly announced that I was holding my pee… in my hand… and couldn’t find a receptacle in the bathroom. The student of the doctor assured me I had followed procedure, put gloves on, took my sample over to the sink about a foot away from my husband, and opened it and STUCK THE TEST STRIP IN IT!!! Right there in front of all of us she was testing my pee!!! She told me the preliminary results and that they would send it to the lab like normal medical professionals. For the rest of the visit things returned to normal then I was sent for blood work. I had an opportunity to ask questions but I couldn’t think of any because I was so distracted.

THE BLOOD WORK: OK this is where it really gets different. I was sent back to the waiting room and instructed to take a ticket for the blood work. My number was called quickly and I went back to a normal room where you give blood. The only thing unusual here was that there were some hospital workers taking inventory of birth related drugs in a cabinet about two feet away from me. The technician tried a couple of times to take my blood but was unsuccessful. She then kindly called upstairs said I had already waited in antenatal and could they put me to the front of the line if she sent me upstairs. After securing me a spot at the phlebotomist where I was assured all the equipment was kept for difficult veins like mine. She assembled all of the test tubes into this wide mouthed aluminum cup and stuck various stickers around the outside of the cup. Trey said the cup looked like the bottom of a jiffy pop container. She handed this to me and directed me upstairs. I walked through the wide, open, sunny lobby and rode the escalators upstairs. I found the blood lab and walked into what I had pictured when I heard stories about NHS care. The room was quite large for a waiting room and had chairs zigzagged all through it with lines of patients waiting for blood work. I went to the desk at the front of the room and said I had been sent from downstairs. They allowed me to sit in an area right outside of the door where I could see people’s blood being drawn.

I was called in quickly. I sat down in front of one of four techs drawing blood. They were super sanitary. For every patient they changed a plastic apron that went from their neck to their knees. They then put hand sanitizer on before putting on plastic gloves. The gentleman made a valiant effort to find a vein and right before he was about to stick a needle in my wrist, like where you take your pulse which didn’t seem like that great of an idea, another technician, the only female in the room, stopped him and called me over. She found a spot on my hand and drew my blood then stuck the stickers from the cup onto the blood. I pointed out to her that the stickers said my maiden name and I kept asking for it to be changed to my married name. She went and got her supervisor who asked me why I hadn’t told them downstairs at the antenatal clinic. I replied that I had and they hadn’t done anything about it. He then said his concern, which was my concern, was that the blood would be sent off with the current name and come back with no matching record because my name would have been changed in the meantime. He appeared frustrated with the antenatal clinic and as he was ripping stickers off of my blood he told me to take my blood back downstairs and ask them for new stickers with the correct name. I then walked… with my blood in a plastic see through baggie… down the escalator through the sunny lobby with the food carts and the waiting visitors and the gift shop and the artwork back to the antenatal clinic. I informed the reception clerk that I was in need of new stickers per the blood lab’s instruction. We proceeded to go through the extensive name change process. I told him my name was Medley. He printed out new labels with “Melody” on them. I said no, “Medley” and he corrected the labels. He gave me two pages of labels a little smaller than Avery 5366. I stood there, blood in one hand, labels in the other, at the desk thinking “what am I supposed to do with these.” He prompted me to put them… on… the… blood. I removed my blood… in the waiting room… peeled new labels and stuck them on my blood then returned my blood to the baggie. He then prompted me to drop it into a hole in the desk I had not previously noticed. Like a square cut out hole. It was not covered up, everyone’s blood was just thrown in there. Like if it struck me I could have just grabbed a bunch of blood and gone running out of there. Like there were pencils, a stapler, pamphlets, and a hole for blood. I dropped my blood in and went to hand him my medical records. He rejected my advance and told me I would need to correct my name throughout my medical records and bring them for my next appointment. Silly me, you keep your own records in the U.K. Trey and I then took labels and covered up everywhere my maiden name was mentioned with my brand new labels with my current name.

The rest of the day will be detailed in another blog because frankly, this one deserves to stand on its own.