My son has not been anywhere near a hospital for the first month of his life. He was born at home and has had all kinds of fun adventures, but no hospitals or doctors until today. Today he met with his pediatrician and it went well. It took a while to pick his doctor but we asked around and were able to get someone that had a great reputation for our needs, was in-network, and happened to be taking new patients. Win, win, win!
To begin with hubby and I both made sure to wear our wedding bands and dress somewhat nice… after all we are a mixed-race couple living in a white town who don’t share the same last name and had a home birth. It is better to be conservatively cautious at first, especially if this will be Baby B’s ped for life. We had 30 minutes with the doctor for the first visit but did not need it. Honestly we have been great and well-informed with the midwife follow-up care we have received. I asked the doctor for a vaccine schedule so my husband and I could choose how to best go about those for our family. Other than that every question he asked I was able to say, “It is there in his records” since I brought his midwife care records and the results of his hearing screening.
The only con of the doctor was when he said he was going to wash his hands before touching B and squirted some antibacterial goo on instead. Yuck. This is the first time someone has touched B after putting that stuff on… triclosan sucks!
It wasn’t a con but the doctor asked where baby slept and we mentioned baby’s cradle for 2/3 of the night then co-sleeping the rest of the morning. He cautioned about the dangers of co-sleeping and we mentioned the precautions we are taking. We all also talked about all the crib recalls. There are no steadfast safe precautions for anything these days it seems like.
There were a whole lot of pros though:
- Doctor brought up topic of no additional care for his uncircumcised penis besides routine cleaning instead of me having to ask him not to do anything to it. That raised my vote of confidence in him.
- There were two posters in the exam room… one was Mia Hamm in all her soccer glory, the other was Jim Belushi from the movie “Animal House.” Both posters raised my vote of confidence in the guy.
- He was really cool when we said we were unsure of our course of action for vaccines, he replied appropriately that he would let us research and use him as a sounding-board if we were still unsure. He also mentioned he has worked in our town for 26 years… in other words he has dealt with a lot of “holistic” parents.
So here are two B pics from today and his visit…
Glad to hear his first visit went well! And I like how he is supportive of you and hubby's choices! That's VERY important.
its sooo important to pick a pedi that respects your wishes! I love ours and we're on a delayed and pick and choose vaccine schedule and our pedi is totally supportive. when we first "shopped" around for pedis and got weird looks at times for some stuff we believe in my husband had the best advice for me. WE'RE HIRING THEM!
Happy to hear the pediatrician's appointment went well. We dumped our first ped when he declared our 4th child a "healthy white female." Um, what? It's still in her medical records.
I'll be reading to see what you all decide about vaccines and things, my sis and I have been talking about that, breastfeeding and other mommy things.