Belly Tales

I wish I could say that my transition from the academic/theoretical portion of the semester to the clinical portion was going smoothly, but alas, ’tis not the case. The hospital I will be doing my clinicals in (a well-known certain Bronx hospital, for all you curious, saavy New York types) has at least two miles of bureacratic red tape to get through before they actually let students begin their clinical rotations: health clearance, security clearance, a policies and procedure class and a computer class—all of which is a real pain in the ass, but pretty standard for most hospitals. The only problem is that this year, I’ve been referred to a woman who works in the nursing department named Ms. V (obviously not her real name) to help me sort out my administrivial clearances, and unfortunately, it seems as if she is rather unfamiliar with my school, and with our clinical rotations. I am under the impression that previous students who did their clinicals at this site went through a different person. Somehow, Ms. V is a new player in this game. She’s asked for copies of my nursing license and registration, my BCLS certification, and my NRP certification—all of which is pretty standard if you’re trying to become employeed as a labor and delivery nurse, but I explained to her that 1) I won’t be working in an RN capacity, 2) my NRP is my neonatal resuscitation certification, which will be unnecessary since I’ll be doing ambulatory prenatal care and well-woman gynecology, and not actually resuscitating any babies at all, and 3) there are direct-entry students in my program who are not nurses, and wouldn’t be able to provide her with all of this documentation—if I didn’t just happen to already be an RN, how would I meet all of these requests? I think part of the problem is that the contact my school has been using for the past few years seems to no longer be working for this hospital, and Ms. V is unfamiliar with my school’s midwifery program, and with the different paths by which people can become midwives (i.e., nursing or direct-entry). This is something my school should have already addressed, and is definitely something that needs to be explained to her so that if future students at this hospital are referred to her, she’ll have a better understanding of what student midwives do, and hopefully their clearances will go much more smoothly—however, I don’t feel it’s my place as a student to be doing this explaining. This is something my school needs to work out with her.

In any case, I provided her with all of the documents she requested, and I wish I could say that was the end of it. However, Ms. V has also requested copies of the master contracts between my school and her hospital, as well as the malpractice insurance policy that covers me as a student, which is again a totally standard and acceptable thing to request. Again, this is something I should have absolutely NOTHING to do with, as a student; these are details that should have been worked out between my program and this hospital long ago. My school has told me that both of these things have been on file with this hospital for over three years now, and this has never been a problem for any of the previous midwifery students from my school who have done their rotations at this hospital. However, this year, because Ms. V is unfamiliar with my school and with this rotation, all of this has come up, and unfortunately, I’ve been somewhat stuck in the middle of it. And finally, add to this some other minor glitches, such as my inability to get the necessary computer class scheduled last week or this week, and the net result is one very frustrated student midwife.

The long and the short of it is this: I was supposed to start clinicals this week, but I will be unable to do so because I haven’t managed to get all of the administrivia cleared yet, so I will officially be a week behind in my clinical hours, from the very start. Nevermind the fact that I’ve been working on getting all of this taken care of for over a month now, or the fact that I have been calling/e-mailing Ms. V and my preceptor and my program directors and clinical coordinator for over a month now. I am going to the hospital again tomorrow to try once again to get all of this sorted out (this will be my third 2+ hour commute to this not-so-close-to-me Bronx hospital in the past three weeks). I have spoken to my preceptor, and will hopefully begin my clinicals next Tuesday, despite the fact that I will need to take a 2-3 hour break from the clinic in order to attend the computer class which I was supposed to take last week, and was hoping to take this week. I am doing my best not to let any of this administrivia color my perception of my actual clinical site, because I’m sure the midwives I will be working with (none of whom have anything to do with Ms. V, or the nursing office, or the administrive process, in general) are all fabulous, lovely people, and I’m sure the site is going to rock (I’ve heard good things about it)…but even so, for the love of filing cabinets, enough with the administrivia already!!!! Urrrrgh!

We’ve been talking so much about menstruation lately that it seems only natural that the subject of alternative menstrual gear would come up at some point. In fact, just last week we were talking about it after class one day, and I ended up bringing my Keeper to school with me to show to a few curious classmates. Frankly, it’s high time that this website had a position statement on alternative menstrual gear. This is something I believe very strongly in, and something I have personally been using for several years now, and it seems just plain Wrong that I haven’t been talking it up something fierce on my own website already. So, enough is enough. Time to spread the good word.

The word goes something like this: About five years ago, I was broke (notice how much has changed in the intervening five years!). I had recently befriended a woman who lived in my neighborhood, and one evening, while hanging out at her house, I noticed that she had a bunch of terry cloth pads laid out next to her sewing machine, made from a cut-up bath towel. When I asked her what they were for, she introduced me to the concept of alternative, reuseable menstrual gear. I was, to put it mildly, a bit flabbergasted. Keep in mind, I was a good girl from the midwest, who’d only been living in New York City for two years at that point, and still hadn’t fully lost my shy, midwestern ways. The message that our society sadly pounds into the skulls of young women (myself included) is that your period is dirty, something that needs to be kept secret and “sanitary”, and most definitely hidden from others. As girls, we’re taught that menstruation is an unfortunate part of growing up, a curse, or at the very least, a major, monthly pain in the ass—something that needs to be tolerated and dealt with, but rarely something that should be celebrated and enjoyed. As part of our induction into womanhood, we’re inundated with ads from the feminine “hygiene” industry, promoting the benefits of this product over that, and encouring the idea that the selection of a feminine hygiene brand is an important rite of passage. All of this just compounds the sense of shame and embarrassment that so many of us feel about our bodies—magazines are full of ways for us to “fix” our bodies, lose weight and attract the man of our dreams by wearing the right clothes and smelling the right way. Commercials for pads and tampons rave about how fresh, clean and discrete their products are. Douches urge us to “cleanse” our (naturally dirty?) vaginas so that they’re strawberry-scented or flower-fresh (and cause untold infections in the process through drastic vaginal flora disruption).

The feminine hygiene industry is a billion dollar industry that feeds off of women’s insecurities and doubts, and has us all suckered into the idea that spending $200 on menstrual products a year is just an unavoidable part of being a woman. Let me put it this way: do you think men would spend $200 a year on hygiene products if they too had an unavoidable monthly biological process that was part of their healthy life-cycle? I’m guessing not. If men had menstrual cycles, I bet health insurance companies would have started covering the expense of their supplies long ago, since, after all, these products would be essential to the health of the insured, same way insurance companies will pay for prenatal vitamins, or the needles and glucometers of diabetics. Why should women be expected to pay out-of-pocket for something that’s part of their yearly health and wellness? (This is somewhat similar to the “logic” used when health insurance companies will pay for viagra, but refuse to cover birth control…but that’s a rant I’ll save for another day). Women have been using cloth for centuries. It’s only very recently that we’ve been expected to pay every month for the pleasure of bleeding onto pearly white, cotton pads.

One woman, in her lifetime, will go through close to 11,000 pads or tampons. That’s a huge amount of uneeded waste going straight to the landfill. The women on this earth account for 51% of the population. If all of us use 11,000 pads in our lifetimes…that’s gotta be a landfill the size of Australia! It’s worth switching to re-useable products for that reason alone, but wait, there’s more: disposable pads suck! Not only do they take up way too much space, and get tossed out after only a few hours of use, but the packaging that comes with the products (the boxes and applicators) are also nothing but landfill fodder, and often end up washing up on beaches. While the FDA assures us that tampon companies no longer use chlorine-bleaching processes to get those pure, snow-white results they’re looking for, this was a practice that was used for decades before the FDA recently outlawed it, and untold amounts of toxic dioxins have been released into our environment because of it, disrupting ecosystems and bioaccumulating in lakes and rivers. (The FDA was also very quick to dismiss the idea that the dioxins in tampons can cause TSS or possibly cancer, but even without the dioxins, tampons are still perfectly capable of causing TSS on their own, just by being such a lovely, squidgy vector for bacteria and infetion). Sadly, dioxin is a very persistent chemical, and even though companies now use chlorine-free bleaching processes, the damage has already been done. Our children and grandchildren will be drinking and eating trace amounts of dioxin in their water and food for decades to come, thanks to the toxic feminine hygiene industry. And I ask you this: why is it necessary that the cotton and rayon of pads and tampons be bleached in the first place? They’re not sterile products that are used for surgery or wounds; they don’t have to be bleached.

Anyway, to make a long story short, my initial reaction to my friend’s cotton pads was “eeewwww!!”, however, it didn’t take long for her arguments to make sense to me: 1) I was broke, and the idea of saving $200 a year not spending that money on pads was very appealing, and 2) I have always been trying to find ways to make my environmental footprint on this earth a little bit lighter, and using cloth pads seemed like a really simple thing to change, which actually has a very large cumulative impact. So I purchased a starter kit of reuseable cloth pads to take care of all my monthly needs and voila!, I was hooked. I’ll let others extol the virtues of free-bleeding, but for my own part, there was something deliciously empowering about taking this aspect of my life out of commercial, profit-driven hands, and into my own capable, human hands. There was also something immensely satisfying about blowing raspberries at the TV screen whenever an ad for tampons came on, and feeling smug and pleased with the knowledge that while other women spent money on pads every month, I didn’t! Course, this method required a certain non-squeamishness when it came to blood, and a willingness to wear heavy cloth pads in my underwear once a month (which did, I must admit, feel like I had a phone book between my legs every now and then), and of course I had to soak them and launder them appropriately. For about two years, this routine suited me just fine (and cloth pads are great, and continue to work well for millions of women around the world)…but then…THEN…I discovered the joys of the Keeper.

Believe me, once I was finally sold on the beauty and sustainability of cloth pads, I was a true-blue, born-again convert, however, I have found that I prefer the Keeper to cloth pads, which means that in my book, it’s really very VERY good. This little cup is a latex product that fits inside of your vagina and functions a lot like an OB tampon, collecting your menstrual flow without drying out your vaginal walls. It requires insertion with your fingers, and periodic emptying (your collected flow can be conveniently emptied into the toilet, then the Keeper can be wiped off and reinserted); I must admit, it does take a little bit of effort to learn how to get it in and out, but once you master it, this is by far the easiest form of menstrual protection I have ever used, AND it’s ecologically friendly, sustainable, reuseable, and relatively cheap, given that you only have to buy one, and then you’re set for the next 10 years. Another beauty of using a menstrual cup is the fact that you don’t have to change your cup nearly as often as you have to change a tampon. On light days, towards the end of my bleeding cycle, I can happily put my Keeper in during my morning shower, and leave it in all day, and forget that it’s even there. And then, at the end of your cycle, all you have to do is wash it out with antibacterial soap, let it soak overnight in a bowl of water mixed with a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide, white vinegar or tea tree oil, and that’s it. So, for those of you who like functionality of tampons (and the lack of phone-book-between-your-legs), but would also like to stop feeding the fat purse of the toxic feminine hygiene industry, and do our planet a major favor, a menstrual cup is definitely the way to go. The Mooncup and Divacup are also every bit as fantastic as the Keeper, they’re just made out of silicone instead of latex, so for those of you with latex allergies, rest assured, there are menstrual cups out there for you, too!

That’s pretty much the end of my schpiel. I know that what works for some women certainly won’t work for all women, but I urge you to think about your menstrual choices. Once you start using alternative methods, you begin to wonder why you ever needed a 7th-grade introduction to feminine hygiene products in the first place. I started using alternative methods about five years ago, and I haven’t once looked back.

For further reading:

The Wise Wound by Shuttle, Redgrove & Drabble.

The Woman in the Body by Emily Martin.

This is a picture of one of my best friends in the entire world, who is 31 weeks pregnant this week. Isn’t she beautiful?? She and her husband have planned a homebirth with a local (Kentucky) midwife, and she’s due the second week of April, which also coincides with my spring break. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to meet her brand new baby over spring break. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get to be there during her birth, and watch and help and love one of the strongest women I know go through one of the most amazing transitions of her life.

Pictures like this are so rejuvenating. I can’t even begin to tell you…in the midst of all of this hard work and the exhaustive amounts of information we’re learning, and the overwhelming stress and late night cramming sessions, it’s such a comfort to be able to look up from the textbook every now and then and see a belly like this and remember why it is that we’re doing this in the first place.

Betty Friedan, author, activist, feminist and extraordinary woman, died yesterday at the age of 85. Have any of you ever read The Feminist Mystique? It’s been on my list forever, but I’ve never managed to find the time. Maybe this is the year to read it, in honor of Betty. May thousands of us continue to carry the torch she held aloft for so long.

Well, I didn’t fail my Antepartum exam last Friday by any means, but I didn’t do nearly as well as I had wanted to do. When I left the exam, I was actually feeling pretty confident about it. Somehow, my grade did not quite reflect this confidence, which is a bit distressing, especially given that 1) this is antepartum, i.e. all about prenatal care and pregnant women, i.e. REALLY IMPORTANT and 2) I hold myself to pretty high academic standards, and generally, I’m able to meet those standards well enough, but this grade was altogether diappointing. My first disappointing grade since I started this program, in fact.

I’ve made an appointment with the professor to go in and review the exam and figure out where the gaps in my knowledge were, and I’ve made a few promises to myself to work a little bit harder on my modules and studying etc. etc. (although, to be honest, I feel like I already do work pretty hard on this stuff, as is, but obviously, my last bout of studying didn’t quite cut it). Anyway, I guess there are always days like this in every student’s career.

In other news: clinicals start next week. Aaaaaaiiiieeeee!!

This is going to sound somewhat strange, but sometimes a few of my posts are inundated with spam track-back comments, which just mucks up my inbox and dashboard, and requires deleting massive amounts of spam comments/e-mails all at once. Which I just finished doing. However, right as I hit the delete button, I noticed that one of the e-mails in my inbox that I was in the process of deleting was not in fact spam, but a sincere e-mail from a reader. Something about Doula Certification. Aaack! To whoever it was that sent me that e-mail: my most sincere apologies for accidentally deleting it. Please send it to me again!!

Thank you!