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Friday, August 01, 2008

Women's Health - Week 1

Finally, the first week of my rotation in Obstetric and Gynaecology is over.

It has been an extremely busy week with most of the lectures for this rotation was given in this week. I think we had about 29 hours of lectures in just over 5 days. At the end of day 5, I am already overwhelmed with the sheer amount of lectures and will need few weeks to digest the entire content of the whole lectures in the first week.

Every day we started at 8 am and it was freezing in the morning. The first two days was held at Mercy Hospital which was about 10km from my home and the last three days was at Royal Women's Hospital. The Women's Hospital is not that far and it is next to the university. It will took me around 10-15 minutes if I am cycling to the hospital biggrin.

The first day was spend on learning about labour and how baby navigate around the tight pelvis to come out to the world.

Few interesting quotes about the labour taken from the lecture...
“Pain in labour is the by-product of the body’s creative activity…
Sheila Kitzinger: The New Pregnancy and Childbirth

“recognition has come slowly that labour, especially first labour, may be the most disturbing emotional event in the lifetime of one-half of humankind…
Driscoll, Meagher, Boylan: Active Management of Labour
The quotes somehow describe how painful the birth delivery was. We were shown a video showing the whole process of labour. The video shows how baby navigate around the tight pelvis and turn around the head and eventually come out from the uterus.

It was an amazing journey to see how the baby head was squashed, rotated and flexed from the dark uterus to the bright world outside. Despite the video only showed the edited version of the natural vaginal delivery since the labour process was quite long, the painful expression of the mother throughout the whole ordeal was clearly shown. The pain may come from the uterine contraction and dilation of the vagina.

The most surprising fact for me was to see how big the placenta compared to the baby. It seems that both placenta and the baby are of the same size.

I think the video managed to convince most of female medical students to choose Caesarean section over natural vaginal delivery. Caesarean is quicker and perhaps less painful than natural process but it also has few disadvantages.

The long arduous process of delivering a baby was something that needs to be praised. I was immediately reminded of how tough it was for my mother to deliver me and all of my siblings without going to Caesarean delivery, and there are 8 of us. That's why we need to respect our mother and father but sometimes we always forget that fact, especially when we are in the rebellious period as a teenager.

I will stop now and continue later....

5 comments:

mosh said...

aren't we glad we don't have to go through labour? ehehehe

أم الليث said...

hahahaha to mosh's comment.

i don't think anyone will ever appreciate how it is until melaluinya sendiri.

actually, kenapa convinced nak elective Caesarean? bad bad bad! apa salahnya NVD? epidural kan ada heee heee heee

Hafiz said...

@mosh, you will only know how painful the labour is when you see one :)

@aliya, that's because most of female medical students are still nulliparous (never having given birth to a child). They don't know which one is better and it seems Caesarean is better, quicker and perhaps less painful than NVD. And the rate of Caesarean section is increasing compared to NVD.

Adzrul Ariff said...

CS has more tendency to future complications...and a woman can only undergo a CS for 3 times usually. ANd I agree about how painful NVD is because there was one time I had to assist my lecturer during a woman's NVD - the woman was struggling because she's a small woman and we assumed the baby was rather large for her size. KEsian sungguh, although the woman successfully delivered her baby but it was obvious that she was in pain...but the pain seemed to vanish instantly when she saw her baby boy. :))

hayad said...

What r the disadvantages of Caesarean ?