Pediatricians, Episiotomies & Circumcisions Oh My!

Is this seriously what is consuming my brain? It's almost September and I should be thinking about football, and tailgating, and planning birthday parties, and bobbing for apples, and making a slutty Halloween costume, and shopping for new cute fall boots but instead......my mind is wrapped around the title of this posts. (Ok the slutty costume thing was a joke.) This sounds bad, but I am consumed with looking at Dr's pictures and ruling out the ones who look like pedifiles. I'm thinking about my vagina being cut or tore open and finally I think it's bogus that a circumcision is an elective surgery that is not covered as part of the whole payment package of having a child.



More specifically, I've been trying to set up meetings with a few pediatricians in our area so we can have "our" Dr. be the one to discharge our baby from the hospital. Well wouldn't you know that our health care system is TOTALLY F-ED UP. Oh wait, you did already know that, everyone does. So it turns out that, after I've spent hours on the phone and made fagillion calls, individual providers (the dr's themselves) and the offices or companies they work for have different tax ID numbers. After doing research I found that if the physician I'm looking at to be our babies dr. bills us under the office's name it will show up as out of network. However if he bills us under his own personal ID number it will show up as in network. WTF? So then I had to call the dr's office and ask them how they bill, and from which address. Many physicians work out of more than one office, however it seems that the shidiots working at Anthem only show them as in network when they bill from one location, and out of network if they bill from another. Just.Plain.Dumb.

To the episiotomy topic. I was reading through some paperwork my Ob had given me way back at my first appointment that I probably should have read earlier but hadn't. It was a flyer on the practice's view point on episiotomies. Basically they believe that even after being fully dilated, most every woman will tear slightly. They believe it is just as healthy to let you tear naturally than to cut you. The only time they will perform an episiotomy is if a) you specifically ask for one or b) the baby is in distress and they need to cut you so you can push it out quickly. Actually I'm totally fine with their vision it's just I wish I would have read this earlier. It's a situation like if I were reading about the episiotomy and only been 8 weeks pregnant I would have just read it and stored the info in my brain and went on. Now however when labor seems much closer I read it and my vagina cringes.

Nothing much to say about circumcisions except for the fact that in the itemized breakdown of costs, the circumcision is about $300 less than the anatomy scan. Uh......Um......... I'm no dude but I'm sure some guys would expect to pay top dollar to have their thing cut and pretty much shaped for life. Just a funny observation.

Tiffany