Devastated

I had the most humiliating experience of my entire life last week.

Mr B has a new car. (Don't panic, we haven't won the lottery and left you out or anything, it's a lease car). It has all these fancy gadgets, one of which is parking sensors. You know, those stupid beepers that warn you when you're about to crash into a large solid object like a wall or another vehicle?

Mr B picked me up from work the other day and I went to put my stuff in the boot.

I set the sensors off.

They thought I was a vehicle.

Carry On Midwifery

During pregnancy, visiting your midwife is supposed to be a positive and reassuring experience. With my midwife, it is more like an episode of a carry on film.

At a recent visit, the midwife began by calling me by my middle name. This is not good. I do not like my middle name. I do not use my middle name. I most certainly do not want my first name to be replaced by it. Said midwife did not understand what she had done to irritate me, even after a very clear and concise explanation from Mr B, who was trying to spare her a very slow and painful death-by-Mrs-B's-evil-eye. 

She then attempted to take blood. You will soon understand why I say attempted. First, she had to find the needle and relevant vials in which to collect my blood. On the surface, this would appear like a relatively simple task, however, it transpires it requires some detective skills. After all, locating a box of empty vials on the top of the only filing cabinet in the room is rather like searching for a snowball in the Arctic (I'm sure you'll agree). 

After locating those pesky vials, she then went to sterilise her hands. Good move, I thought, until she squirted the hand gel at the window instead of in her hands. This was the woman I was supposed to let near me with a sharp and pointed needle. Mr B kept saying everything would be fine. He tells lies. 

She began with my right arm. She tried to find a vein, failed, and stabbed me randomly in the muscle of my arm before saying "oh, there's nothing coming out of that one" as though surprised that my muscle was not leaking blood. She moved to the left arm. She tightened the band around it, then proceeded to watch the vials roll off the desk onto the floor, before looking around the room in amazement that they had disappeared. By this point there was a rather large, throbbing, purple vein from which to take the blood. You could not have missed it if you tried. Hell, I could have taken the blood from my own arm it was that big. She missed. Or rather, punctured the vein in a variety of places, leaving me with a rather heavily bleeding left-arm (which later turned into the most horrendous bruise you have ever seen from a simple blood test).

This is the woman I am supposed to trust to bring my baby safely into the world. Suddenly a home birth is not looking like such a terrible idea....