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Childbirth

feeling worried about birth

5 replies

cwhite · 27/01/2015 12:56

I've been feeling fairly confident and calm about giving birth but have just had my confidence destroyed. My community group practice midwife (who will be with me on the day) never checked my blood test results and I got a call from one of her colleagues who checked and I've found out that I'm rhesus negative.

This isn't the first time she has lost my paperwork and I'm now terribly anxious about how much attention to detail she has and whether I can trust her during the labour. I'm 6 and a half months pregnant so don't particularly want to change at this stage but have spent the past couple of days crippled in fear by the fact she has been missing things. If I go with the group practice midwife there will be two midwives with me during the birth, but it sounds like if I got with the hospital midwife there will only be 1.

Has anyone changed their midwives at this stage before? Part of me thinks I'm overreacting but I have totally lost my confidence at this point. What situation could I have the maximum medical monitoring/ expertise in?

OP posts:

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GotToBeInItToWinIt · 27/01/2015 13:02

I've never heard of the community midwife guaranteed to be with you, what if you go into labour in the middle of the night? Will she be there for all the births in your area?
If you have no confidence in her it might be detrimental to you to have her at the birth. The last thing you want is to worry about the competence of your caregiver.

I had the standard one hospital midwife. Having one was absolutely fine for me, she was really unobtrusive and pretty much left me to it which is what I wanted. I didnt want someone hovering about. The baby's heart rate started to drop as I was pushing so an additional midwife and a Dr were brought in. At that point I didn't care who was in the room, I just wanted her out safely! A midwife will always call for back up if necessary, and I'm not sure how it would help having two there all the way through.

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GotToBeInItToWinIt · 27/01/2015 13:03

However just to point out I never saw the same midwife more than once during my entire pregnancy so didn't have the chance to form a relationship with any.

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rubyboo2 · 27/01/2015 16:56

Hi OP the community Midwife will not be the one delivering your baby , the hospital ones will , if you have a hospital birth . x

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NickyEds · 27/01/2015 20:00

Same as pp. I had mostly had the same mw for my antenatal appointments and she did my 5 day post natal one too but if you have your baby in hospital here you just get the available mw on shift. There's little to no advantage to having two mw though, I had three mw(due to shift changes) during labour but only had two present at once for when ds actually came out.