By: Vincent C. Sales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
April 25, 2012
Time to panic. Our second baby is due in
one month, and we haven’t even settled on a name yet. Having been through this
all before, I thought it would be easier the second time around, but that’s just
not the case.
My wife and I know better now. We know
more. We’re faced with a ton of options that we weren’t aware of before. Some of
these options are more of the usual, some are cutting edge science and some are
just plain bizarre.
We’re talking “Survivor”’s bug-eating
levels of bizarre. We’re talking everything from giving birth underwater, to
freezing your baby’s cord blood for future gene therapy, to cooking your
placenta and chowing down on it later. Yes, these are the options we’re faced
with in modern childbirth. Just relax and enjoy the show. Oh, and feel free to
panic at any time.
Water
birth?
Speaking of panicking, that was what I was
doing when our first baby was being delivered. I was a deer caught in the
headlights, mesmerized until the nurses screamed at me to start taking photos.
My wife, meanwhile, turned out to be some kind of Olympic champion of
childbirth. She was fully dilated in minutes before the doctor even arrived at
the operating room, pushed my baby boy out in five epic pushes, and later had
the audacity to complain that she didn’t need the epidural. I brag about her
every chance I get.
It’s no wonder then that this time around,
our OB recommends that we do a water birth, or as I see it, she wants to raise
the difficulty for my Olympic champion.
The benefits are clear: It’s cheaper.
There are other benefits such as less trauma for the baby, pain relief for the
mother that
immersion in water gives, and the lowered need for an episiotomy (look it up!),
but I didn’t hear anything else after the doctor said that it’s cheaper.
So we went on the tour of the St. Luke’s
Global City water birth facilities, where the nurses proudly showed us the
humongous bathtub and gorgeous suite, and whispered to us that Maricel Laxa had
given birth there. And hey, if it’s good enough for Maricel Laxa…
…It may not be good enough for the wife,
who voiced discomfort about giving birth naked in a giant bathtub, far from
pain-killing drugs and baby-monitoring machines. Critics of water birth also
point out the increased risk of infection as you get water all the way up your
wazoo, though the numbers show no significant difference.
Save the cord blood? Or save money?
Another difficult decision that we’ll have
to make soon is whether to save the baby’s cord blood or save that money for the
kid’s future instead.
Cord blood contains stem cells, and if you
paid attention during science class, then you know that stem cells can
differentiate into any cell that the human body
requires. Say, if you develop leukemia, then your body needs
new bone marrow. The stem cells from cord blood can be made to create this new
bone marrow. Have a burn? Squirt some stem cells on it to make new skin. It’s
literally the future of medicine.
Science class over. Here’s the wager:
Saving your baby’s cord blood can provide a cure/treatment for 80 diseases, such
as some forms of leukemia, lymphoma and cerebral palsy. This branch of medical
science also promises even more cures for things like heart disease and diabetes
in the not-too-distant future. On the other hand, the chances of your child
getting one of the diseases that cord blood can treat today are incredibly slim
to non-existent. On the other other hand, having a cure for one those diseases
would be priceless.
The price of this wager? A wallet-gutting
P40,000 plus VAT upon signing up, and another P8,000 plus VAT for every year
thereafter until your child is 18, at which point you can choose to transfer
costs to him or her. Hmmm…
Your placenta: Throw away, bury, or
EAT?
After the successful birth of our first
son, a nurse popped in to ask us what we wanted to do with the placenta. She had
the thing in a see-through plastic bag, and it looked like two very bloody kilos
of lean beef, or a liver, or something in between. The last response in my head
was, “I’d like to cook it and feed it to my wife.”
Move aside, “Bizarre Food.” More and more
people are saying that eating your placenta after childbirth is a good idea. Or
could it just be the latest fad?
The practice of eating your placenta
landed on our radar as my wife was researching ways to avoid post-partum
depression. The numbers vary, but it’s estimated that 80 percent of women
experience some form of post-partum depression, and my wife was one of them.
It’s believed that eating your placenta
can reduce post-partum depression and do a whole bunch of other good stuff, like
help mothers’ uterus return to normal size and even stimulate milk
production.
If you’re interested in chowing down on
your afterbirth after birth, you should know that as of now, there are no
medical institutions that support this practice in the Philippines. Depending on
the hospital, however, it is mostly not difficult to come home with your
placenta since the practice of burying your placenta in your backyard with a
tree is commonplace.
Preparing the placenta for ingestion
remains a strictly DIY process. You steam it, dry it, grind it and then place it
in capsules that you ingest like medicine. (So there go my dreams of seeing my
wife wolf down a chunk of raw meat like Daenerys in “Game of Thrones.”)
Jenny Ong, from the blog Chronicles of a
Nursing Mom, had her placenta encapsulated in the States. “With my first born, I
cried every day from day three until about she was one month,” she said. “With E
(my second child), I only cried once the entire time.
“I managed to take care of both kids
without losing my sanity,” Jenny went on to say, something that we’re hoping for
with our second baby. “I also would like to think that it affected my milk
supply.”
The older I get, the more I realize that
unlike the Rolling Stones song, time is not on my side. In less than a month, my
wife and I will have to decide on a number of things that may affect the rest of
our lives in very significant ways. I don’t know what we’ll decide on right now.
I only know that the choices we make will be with our family’s best interests in
mind. That’s all the world asks of us. And in the end, whatever happens,
everything will be fine. No need to panic.
