I didn’t particularly want to be treated like royalty, but I sure as hell didn’t like being treated like a lab animal, either. I was clearly not a person to most of the staff, and I particularly did not enjoy having a half a dozen doc wannabes peering up into what I had previously considered to be my private parts without so much as an introduction. I was just told what position to get in. I was not given any options on treatments. During one shift, two nurses were giving me injections of pitocin, but only one of them was writing the doses on my chart. The other wasn’t checking my chart to see if I’d received the shots, and not writing down what she was doing, either. The one who was writing stuff down finally caught the one who wasn’t writing it down as the slacker was coming out of my room. No, I didn’t get an explanation or apology, but I COULD hear what was said out there.
I was in a ward with 11 other women, with just very light cloth curtains for privacy. No chairs for visitors, and we were all expected to keep our newborns in a mobile crib next to us, except when we took a shower or had to use the bathroom. Yeah, that was real restful.
Leave it to **Lynn Bodoni **to say it for me: I don’t give a shit about feeling like I’m at the Ritz. I wanted a birthing place and birthing attendants who respected me as a competent adult. Sadly, this seems to be a relatively rare find. (I was lucky and had a free-standing birth center nearby.)
Now I’m a little worried that Disney will start offering new birthing vacation packages.
The medical center where my son was born had 2 “birthing suites” which were the same as the other delivery rooms, but with softer surfaces and lighting. You could bring your own music. I don’t remember the specifics of how you got to be in one of those. It wasn’t important to me.
My son arrived four minutes before midnight on a slow night. After he was born I was alone in a 2 bed room with him in a bassinet in the room. Pretty quiet, as best I can recall.
When I read “princess treatment” I thought of women demanding different ice chips and needing custom hospital gowns. I’m sure they’re out there.
Would you prefer to be Cinderella, Snow White, Ariel, Alice (in Wonderland), or Mulan? The last two are, according to Kingdom Hearts, “princesses of the heart”. I think that this means that some bright boy (or girl) in Disney decided that ALL the female characters in Disney animations could be packaged and sold as a Princess of some sort at a tidy profit.
You could give birth with an Evil Stepmother Queen as your head nurse!
I wonder what it’s going to be like if and when Kate Middleton gives birth. I guess they don’t need to have witnesses to the birth, since they could tell now by DNA testing if the baby was switched. I bet it’s still going to be a media circus. No thanks, I would not want a birth experience like that.
This. Some of the women in my birthing classes behaved like the pregnant versions of bridezillas; we’ll call these women “momzillas”. The momzillas had this great fantasy going that they would have a fast, painless labor, an easy delivery, and generally have their precious asses kissed by every doctor, nurse, aide, and whoever else in the hospital, and they made it clear that that’s what they were going to get. At one point, the nurse who was teaching one of the classes disabused us of any notions of the princess treatment, because every one of us either had a high-risk pregnancy or were facing high-risk labor. This could mean that anything could happen and it was best not to expect a whole lot of princess treatment. One momzilla insisted – rather emphatically, I might add – that she would never go for a C-section because she didn’t want a scar to screw up her bikini line. The nurse looked her in the eye and told her that if it was a choice between a scar and a living, healthy baby, or no scar and a disabled or dead baby, well, Momzilla had best re-think her priorities; she did just that or at least shut up about it. I loved that nurse!
Fortunately, I don’t plan to get pregnant again, so I don’t have to sweat momzillas.
The last time I read about a princess giving birth was in a historical novel set in the middle ages. Princess was plunked down in the birthing chair and the fun commenced, with dozens of ladies in waiting, attendants, etc. … When I gave birth years ago, it was terrifying and I wanted to just get it over with. In the hospital. I could have been esconced on velvet cushions in the penthouse suite in Trump Towers and it would not have been any more pleasant.
Do the hospitals charge the insurance company more for these deluxe accommodations, as opposed to a standard private birthing room? If so, why do insurance companies pay for it if there is no affect on the medical outcome?
If these perks are being paid by insurance, that’s and example of why everyone’s medical premiums go up 10-15% every year. But hopefully I’m wrong about that.
In the hospital where my grandchild was born all the labor/delivery/postpartum rooms were basically the same. And they were nice. Insurance usually pays the same basic amount regardless of the room type. I doubt it’s a factor in medical premiums.
The rooms were superficially much like a hotel or motel room. Bed, sofa, rocking chair, end tables, etc. However, they had all of the appropriate medical equipment for labor, delivery and recuperation. I think a c-section might have to be done elsewhere, but I’m not sure.
One could also argue that this type of service, treating mothers as rational, functional human beings instead of mindless animals could certainly result in better medical outcomes. In the “good old days (not)” women in labor were often given general anaesthesia whether they wanted it or not, resulting in overly sleepy babies.