SOC reveals he's a quitter whilst Keri sews up plot holes on Twitter about the wicked wife-sitter! Discuss the Archers here.

[PseudoBadger]

Not long until our thread's 3 year birthday!

I assume though that the sw Rob and Arsula know that PE is potentially fatal?
Surely she would be having her bp measured v regularly.

Thanks Small, I know nothing of baby things (barren spinster) but I do know about PE and cannot believe that they would not be monitorng her closely.

So Ian IS Henry's godfather!

Also checked with Lowfield. Helen had her interface with the turkey baster on Tuesday 11th May 2010. If that was two weeks from her last period, due date would have been 1st February 2011. So 4 weeks early. Did she really say last night that he was born at 30 weeks? How can they get this stuff wrong when it's so easy to check? Or do they just not see it as important?

I know the generations are off but yesterday's ep threw these two up

Now resigned to this being my mental pic every time I hear Ursula or Rob

Helen's having her baby

...LOCALLY

I just re-checked - it didn't actually say Ian was godfather, just that his middle name was Ian. I'll plough through a bit more and see if I can find any mention of the christening.

According to BBC TA site, Henwee was 6 weeks prem

I've no idea how old Knob is but the idea of mothers having a choice of where to deliver went out in 70s and didn't come back in until this century.

I don't think that's quite correct - I know people who had home births in the late 70s/early 80s.

Muddha

Totally overinfested I have been reading anout 2nd pg after PE and home birth afyer caesarian (HBAC).
Maybe TA are going to use this to do an educationsl piece of mw lead v hospital birth, HBAC, uterine rupture etc. And emphasise that its the woman's choice.

Maybe.

Although if that were the case you'd think we'd have heard some of the fhat by now (also livestock farmers are generally quite au fait with these things (except PE which cows don't get) so you'd think they might be more likely to discusz it than non farmers)

Yes, Gruntled but probably only if deemed low risk and in areas with abundant midwifery, sympathetic GPs etc etc.

Overinfested here too. I have lots to be getting on with but could not rest until I had tracked down what I was sure I remembered - that the BBC decided that Henry was born 6 weeks early but that was wrong.

As I said above, the insemination was on 11th May. Helen did a positive pregnancy test 14 days later, suggesting her LMP was indeed 14 days before conception. So due date of around 1.2.11. No way on earth was he six weeks early with that date for conception.

This BBC MB thread made nostalgic reading.

Nostalgic indeed Gasp0de

Interesting post in that message board about Helen yomping around the hills and dales a few days before the emergency pre-eclampsia. Yet now everyone accepts that she's too tired to work a till?

Gaspode that link has made me laugh, especially the kick up the sanctimonious backside.

It shows its consistently ridiculous

and absolutely exhausted by buying a shirt

Mmm, so in TA universe, human gestation is elastic and subject to the demands of dramatic imperatives (Nigel dies, Henry is born). We should be wary, then, of the GADD of 19 May being set in stone. It will happen as decreed by SOC.

Let's just hope Alastair is back in the fold in case there's an emergency...

Wasn't that her 20 week scan? Shouldn't that have been weeks ago?

Shocked at how negligent borchester general is in treating a woman with Helen's history and obvious weight loss

On the messageboard from 2011 (Gasp0de's link above), you get comments like this about the then editor. Sounds familiar. Plus ca change...

She was but it seems that in TA now everything happens to suit VW and her schedule. Totally ridiculous the way it was all rushed through and again unrealistic and ill researched. The esteemed (in her own eyes) editor thinks we are all idiots it appears.

In some respects that messageboard points up the danger of assuming that the SWs have it wrong if they don't depict optimum medical care, because we know that in RL it doesn't necessarily happen. They were very scornful of the fact that Helen was up and about and in SCBU within a couple of days of an emergency Caesarian caused by pre-eclampsia, yet something very similar happened to a friend of min. Not only did she have the raging blood pressure and the emergency CS, she had a seizure afterwards. But, far from being regularly monitored, she said the nurses would regularly forget and would then come and do three checks between 5 and 6 so they could fill in the charts. They were hassling her to get up and help look after the baby after a couple of days, and she found herself near to collapse with exhaustion but having to stand there holding up the feed drip for ages because the fitting for hanging it up had broken.

The home birth thing - after my first by CS, an older mother told me about a "friend" who'd had 3 CS's then went on to have a fourth by homebirth. And her child would have been of a similar age to Knob.
It's only through discussion with my Obs who made it clear just why this would be a bad idea and another friend who had an awful time after her third CS, that I realised just how much of a bad idea this must have been.

I think Knob, and Ursula seem to think they can make things happen how they want.
So Rob sees Helen as a certain kind of earth mother, and will do whatever he can to make sure that happens. They just don't have the vaguest clue that life doesn't always allow that - and the consequences can be fatal.

I would agree with that, mummytime. They're neither of them very bright but they think they are, and nothing is ever their fault - there's always someone else to blame. Dangerous.

GruntledOne, the whole business of research is tricky. If drama shows everything going perfectly, it will grate on those who know it often doesn't, but on the other hand if they show everything going wrong because of NHS funding issues/incompetence, it would take the focus away from Ambridge. What often seems to happen is that the SWs get advice from experts which they don't fully understand, so they end up portraying things in an unrealistic way that satisfies nobody. The pre-eclampsia story was a good example of that, because they grasped that it was a medical emergency but not that it would continue to need careful monitoring for days and days after the birth. That didn't suit them at the time, because all the focus had to be on the aftermath of Nigel's death and Helen/Bridge Farm just faded into the background.

The point is Helen didn't plan an emergency CS and pre-eclampsia last time, events just took their course. It doesn't really matter what Knob and Ursula want she could still end up being rushed into hospital. I would be astonished with her history if the midwife just gave the nod and waved it through if that's what Helen suggests she wants. Most irritatingly it hardly fits in with Knob's previous obsession with wanting what's best for the baby with Helen as incubator. Am fast losing interest in this storyline as much like the great north move, the death of HP and Ruth's dash to New Zealand it is becoming too far fetched to be credible which is a pity as it was one of the few believable, subtly developed storylines.

Wasn't it Hayley and Roy's Abby who was supposed to have been born 10 weeks early? I also seem to remember that there was extensive discussion on the BBC Message Board which concluded fairly definitively that Hayley's dates as broadcast meant that in fact Abby was less than 10 weeks premature, but that the SWs went for 10 weeks for dramatic purposes and hoped we wouldn't notice. Or something like that - all a bit vague now.

I don't think the recent scan was the 20 week one as they had a private scan at 16 weeks to find out the sex and that was more than a month ago wasn't it? This was probably a growth scan or something.

I know Helen is a bit browbeaten but instead of whining incoherently about how it's all such a difficult choice and the doctors have advised hospital birth is better she needs to say "OK Rob, you say it's my decision. Here are ten reasons why I agree with the doctors and these are the 10 reasons why I do not think home birth is appropriate". And she also needs to talk to Pat about it FFS - someone who was actually in her life when Henry was born.

Finally, given Amy's heroic spotting of the PE, you'd think they'd have remained in contact and she'd be straight on to Amy asking for her opinion.

Bah.