Hospital Tour

Joe and I took the West Hills Hospital Tour where we’ll be delivering.  They gave us a form to fill out to pre-register which is step one but we still need to go in and have them make photocopies of our insurance cards and driver’s licenses, fill out more forms and pay the co-pay to finish the pre-registration.  I won’t get into the debate on the American medical care system but it’s clearly flawed and stupid when the most important thing is making someone in labor spend thirty minutes filling out paperwork to make sure they can pay.  I really think having a healthcare system that is profit based for insurance and pharmaceutical companies is one of the greatest downfalls of our country.

The person giving the tour wasn’t very good.  She didn’t seem to know that many answers to questions.  Plus, she had a continuous cough the entire time.  But we did get to tour the facility.  Normally West Hills offers private rooms but just our luck they are starting construction just when I’ll be delivering and they will lose three rooms at a time so it’s likely I’ll have to end up sharing a recovery room.  The worst part is that she said they will have to force the dads to go home in shared rooms since there’s no beds for them.  That is total and utter bullshit!  I want my husband there with me when we have our baby.  It really kind of makes me want to change hospitals.  Valley Presbyterian Hospital is actually the closest to us.  They only have shared recovery rooms but they let the dads stay on cots they have available.  They don’t kick them out.  Unfortunately, our doctor is only contracted to work out of West Hills Hospital so in order to switch hospitals we’d have to switch doctors again which I do not want to do.  The only thing we can do is just hope we get lucky and there aren’t that many deliveries the day we have our baby.

We received a small packet of useful information about pre-registration, visiting hours, what to bring to the hospital and she told us if we are coming outside of regular hours to go to the ER and they will admit us to the maternity ward.

This is all very new to me.  I have never spent the night in a hospital ever.  I’ve actually only been to the hospital three times in my life.  Once when I was a kid and fell off my bike and needed stitches and twice Joe took me to the ER.  Once when I was throwing up blood after my botched gum graft surgery and once when I sprained my shoulder.  I felt kind of scared touring the hospital actually.  I know I can do this.  People have babies all the time but it’s still a little scary to think about.