Yesterday we toured the hospital where I expected to deliver. It's on the Lower East Side, right next to the park in Stuyvesant Square. The park is nice, but the fountains are super lame. See? We New Yorkers should be ashamed of ourselves. If the Romans can keep up the wonderful gushing extravaganza of the Trevi Fountain, then surely we can do better than Stuyvesant Square's lame squirts.
Anyhoodle, the tour was actually pretty reassuring. We were told that Beth Israel is just finishing up a big construction/renovation of their maternity areas, so everything was super-sparkly new.
But the great part was our tour guide, an RN and parent educator who had a ton to say about American so-called health care standards and how support for parents is totally inadequate. She gave a big thumbs-up to NJ for requiring paid leave for parents with newborns, and urged us to get involved with activism for parental leave and breastfeeding support.
She said the hospital's procedures support skin-to-skin contact and rooming in, to facilitate breast-feeding. After weeks of reading horror stories about hospital nurseries run on sugar water bottles and feeding schedules, it was nice to see this facility making changes, and being proud of it.
After the tour, we stopped for lunch at Veselka. Perogies and kielbasa -- yum!
1 comment:
Our hospital was also on the somewhat progressive end: promoting breastfeeding and rooming in and the like. And we did it all. But I confess, each time Raina needed a diaper change, I buzzed the nurse. No one else was getting in line to change her diaper when I was at home, and so I took full advantage at the hospital! It was glorious.
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