tiredI'm reading this CTR about two doctors and I was completely jolted by the third paragraph. The others are included to provide context.
..."Do you act as his pediatrician?"
Nicolette gave him a negative shake of her head. "No. Mrs. Delaney gave birth to David at home with the help of a midwife. The baby has never seen a doctor until this morning."
"I see." Ridge said. But frankly, he didn't. Sometimes it amazed him to hear the reasons some people used to avoid doctors and medical facilities. In Ms. Delaney's case, he figured it was money and misguidance from someone close to her."Uh, WTF? Plenty of people with or without money use a midwife with no problems, no complications, and not, as this book seems to imply, a lack of follow-up on the progress and care of the child.
Because these are unvocalised thoughts, they don't get addressed in the pages that immediately follow, or possibly at all. I find myself seething with resentment and trying to suppress the urge to turn the authors name to the midwifery Nazis who would certainly explain the error of her ways in 1,000 emails or less.
The fact that it's then followed up with her tearful protestations about not being able to afford all these expensive tests he's wanting to run seems to lend credence to his opinion, which further irritates me. (Being a heart surgeon, obviously David is having a heart problem. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? No, no. It's part of the plot. The idea is to show that the Dr. is all bleeding heart/compassion. Of course, it's sorta backfired. I think he's a jerk.)
And I know, intellectually, that she's given voice to the character and it doesn't necessarily represent her thoughts. And that she's right. A lot of doctors do think that way. That the only people who would use a midwife or prefer a home birth are poor, uneducated saps who don't know, or can't afford better, and REAL mothers, who love their children, would OBVIOUSLY be in a hospital where they could have immediate access to "the best medical care," in other words, cookie cutter services designed to fit on medical rotation schedules, rather than services tailored to the needs of the individual.
I'm not sure where this idea that midwives come cheap is from either. In the hospital there's always some sort of minimal health care for pregnancy. Medical welfare like Medicare or something should kick in, and certainly for the insured, it's all covered, but if you want a midwife, you end up paying for it, because the government and the insurance companies prefer cookie cutter care, it's easily quantified and defended.
Bah.
I woke up from this dream all chilled, and pretty much knew I wasn't getting back to sleep.
We were in this city. We were exploring, there was team of about 6 of us, trying to find a way to get out from under the yoke of Cylons. The city was basically a large multi-levelled building. We had to find another way into the Cylon section. Our section was all the area to our left, both up and down, although more down than up. The floor we we were on was (we believed) the only one that connected the two sections, allowing Cylons access to our living areas. We'd explored behind us. There were elevators off to the right slightly in front of us, and actually several sets. We couldn't take the elevators though. Cylons used them all the time and we didn't really know what type of monitoring or defences, automated or otherwise they had set up.
So we went the direction we could get to, in front of us. No one was around and we wandered into the one of the restricted Cylon sections. To find it totally deserted. No Cylons in any direction. We wandered into a room and talked it out, realizing that the layout was identical to "the old city" and they'd just mindlessly built it identically even though they had no use for subdivided rooms, or multi layered rooms, or the the bizarre Escheresque step and maze construction the room we entered had. As we split up to cover the room, a team of Cylon centurions in both silver and gold came in. No guns drawn, nothing like that we. We hid and waited for them to fire, but they didn't. It was like they didn't even see us. We wondered if they'd disabled their sensors because they weren't expecting to see us. It was completely odd.
Then they pulled out a soccer ball and started playing soccer. I watched in awe as a gold centurion foot, kicked the ball off to another centurion. On the other side of the room, I could see one of my colleagues turned away from the computer monitor he was supposed to be accessing to watch open-mouthed. As they moved around the room, we kept moving out of their physical range, because we figured even if they didn't see us, they would certainly feel us if they bumped into us. Sure enough, one of our guys ran out of space as a Cylon went into a corner near me for a ball. I shot it at point-blank range. Still the others didn't react, not even to the noise or the falling of their comrade. But then another one came too close. We tried to lose it in the maze of steps we were in, but it wasn't fooled, even though it was obvious it couldn't see us. But it remembered having felt us or something and was trying to figure out what was wrong.
Then we saw a green guy with tentacles, like a squid. He came in and gathered the Cylons, and we got the hell out there before they noticed that a few of them were missing. Then I woke up.
It's really thrown me off my game though. But I'm going to cowboy us and go downstairs and set up the bookcase like a good girl.