We went to the doctor last week. Well actually it’s a midwife. Shawna has decided to take on a new experience this time and give birth to this baby at a midwife center. The biggest difference being there won’t be any anesthesia.
Anyway, all is well. The baby has a healthy heartbeat. The due date is estimated to be February 26th. We should know in about 5 weeks if it is a boy or girl.
The midwife was very nice and has a much different approach to doing things than the typical OB-GYN. Our great friends Lenny & Tathie used this midwife’s services for one of their children and that has a lot to do with Shawna’s choice to go this route. It seems like it will be a good experience.
Of course we’re conscious about the cost but we’re trying to not let that be too much of our focus. There have already been tears in our house because it is just so wrong how much healthcare and insurance costs in this country. A hospital birth with a cash discount would probably cost about the same as the midwife even though we’re probably going to try and get a discount from the midwife’s regular pricing too, but I’ll talk more about those numbers in a later post. (I want to share later some things we’re doing to raise the money to prepare for it since it is what Joe Sangl would call a “known upcoming expense”.) For now I’d like to share something on the humorous and political side.
The midwife is smart. She sends her patients to Greenville Tech for free ultra sounds, so that’s where we’ll go for that. She also uses the public health department for blood work. She drew Shawna’s blood samples last week and we took them to the public health department lab for testing. This is where the political humor comes in. We had to dodge people in the parking lot and walk through several people just hanging around waiting in different doorways and hallways on our way to the lab. We were the only white people in the place. Now I’m all about our free country and cultural diversity and all that so don’t think I’m going down a prejudice trail.
The reason we were the only white people in the place is because everyone else was Mexican. Well I take that back – most of the workers were African-American, but I’m not talking about my fellow citizens. What I want to talk about is all the Spanish-only speaking Mexicans that were there. I say Spanish-only speaking because that’s all they can speak – no Engles (or however they spell it).
Now I don’t want to come across prejudice against any ethnic group because I’m not. Some of my best friends on my soccer team in high school were Mexican – English speaking Mexicans or at least some that were learning English. I’m on a friendly first name basis with the owner of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants here in town – he’s a nice Catholic family man, and he’s Mexican-American. I don’t have a problem with Mexicans in general. I have a problem with the illegal aliens we allow to live in our country and exploit our idiot government programs at we the taxpayers’ expense.
Shawna couldn’t help but laugh as I walked through the place and out loud said “my baby is going to cost me thousands of dollars but I bet his is free” and then as we passed some more people “hey – I bet I’m paying for his baby too”. I was saying it loud enough for them to hear me. You might be thinking what an aweful jerk I am for saying things like that right in front of these people. I have to remind you these were Spanish-only speaking Mexicans. They didn’t understand me and if they did they wouldn’t dare act like it because if they get caught speaking English they might get treated like a citizen.
I’ll stop ranting about this now cause I could go on and on all day, and forgive me if I’m offending someone who is actually trying to become a citizen, speak our language, and work to fund our government for those who really need it. I commend those who are making a better life for themself here without doing it at everyone elses expense. But during those moments the other day I just had to make humor to keep from getting furious that I had to wade through people from another country to get to my own
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