Continuing on in a series of short posts about my learning’s from our antenatal classes, Claire and I attended our second last session tonight. This evening started out with a stroll through the Gold Coast Pindara Private Hospital, followed up by our normal discussion session.

The walk through Pindara Private was useful, as I hadn’t seen the inside of it before. Our instructor Alex had warned us previously that it is quite easy to get lost, however that it was much better than a couple of the hospitals in Brisbane. Given how much of a maze the Brisbane hospitals are, I wasn’t holding by breath to be honest but I was pleasantly surprised. In defense of the Brisbane hospitals, I do think that Pindara Private is significantly smaller – so that has to help in detangling the mess! While we walked around, we got to have a look at one of the four birth suites which was good – didn’t have any idea what that was going to be like. Alex directed us to look into one of the others, only to hear one of the other nurses telling us to wait in a slightly urgent manner – turns out that it hadn’t been cleaned yet. Fortunately for the people that strolled in there, ‘not cleaned’ didn’t mean that it was fresh out of use – just that beds and the like hadn’t been sorted.

Once we’d finished our 50c tour of Pindara Private hospital, we went back downstairs to our normal meeting room to continue our learning. The primary topics for this evening were post natal depression and breast feeding. There was a lot of information covered in the post natal depression and a lot of good questions from the class as well. While I think every expecting parent has heard about post natal depression, I was shocked that current statistics suggest 1 in 6 women fall victim to it and even more shocked to find out that it also effects males, though to a lesser degree (1 in 11 are the numbers emerging). While a lot of the information covered for post natal depression was fairly high level, it appears that acknowledging that it exists, keeping an open eye for any of the signs and lots of communication seem to be a pretty solid starting point.

Breast feeding is another one of those amazing things that the female body is capable of in my opinion. I find it incredible to think that the female body automatically adjusts how much milk to produce based on the demand and it also changes the nutritional make up as well. An interesting fact that I had absolutely no idea about – an infants stomach is only the size of a marble and continues to expand as the mothers’ breast milk comes in and by approximately 10 days after birth has expanded to the size of a golf ball.

While Alex didn’t say that she was going to attempt to schedule the anesthetist again, I was hoping that he/she might be able to pop in for a little while to discuss that in more depth. It wasn’t to be this evening and we ran over time as it was – maybe one of them will be able to make it to our last session.