Originally Posted by new in the hood
I delivered at Pennsylvania last week. I had been quite irritated to get the letter from the hospital about the renovations, since it arrived about 2 weeks before my due date. Switching hospitals or providers simply wasn't an option at that point!
First, the positive. As with my first birth, the nursing care was phenomenal. Couldn't have asked for more - both in L&D and in postpartum.
Fortunately, things weren't too busy when I went into labor, so after my PETU assessment, they moved me right into a delivery room. After birth, they were very respectful of my wish for nonseparation and an L&D nurse did the baby's bath and assessment right in the room, then we went to the postpartum room together.
I did have a roommate, as expected. To be fair, with my first birth, I had a roommate too. Poor thing had some problems and had to be moved into a telemetry unit. Of course, being in a shared room, I heard EVERYTHING about her situation - couldn't help it since the only choice would have been leaving the room, which was not an option given that I'd delivered 4 hours previously. Struck me as a huge violation of her privacy.
I then had a private room for a good 36 hours. They moved another woman into my room on my last night and that was irritating. It was the middle of the night (2:00 am) and she had to go through all of her check in procedures. She also had her baby in the room and the baby was a squealer. Nothing wrong with that, except that I was struggling to get sleep (I forgot how many times you get interrupted in a hospital). Plus, honestly, it is one thing for your own kid to wake you in the middle of the night, but pretty annoying to be woken by someone else's kid. Couldn't really be mad -- newborns cry, duh, but, you know what I mean.
Fortunately, I left pretty early the next day.
So, all in all, a 1/2 good, 1/2 bad experience. Again, even without the renovations, I'm not sure I would have had a private room. (With my first son, they told me privates were reserved for c-sections.) But, if we were going to have another baby (which we aren't), I would definitely go to a hospital with private rooms -- even given the advantage of Pennsylvania's convenience, the quality of the nursing care, and the quality of the NICU (which, fortunately, we didn't need this time.)
|