Regular checkup at the clinic + Hearing Bambino's heartbeat!

In Singapore, one basically sees the gynaecologist all the way throughout the pregnancy, sometimes once every month, if you can afford it. The key here is that we pay to see the gynae.

On the other hand, being in London for the large part of our pregnancy with Bambino has allowed us to experience the oh-so-good and FREE NHS maternity system.

I've already explained in my earlier post that in UK, one primarily deals with the midwives (rather than gynaes) for all our checkups, tests, and pregnancy queries, unless one's pregnancy is diagnosed to be problematic, or when one is about to give birth. This is not surprising, considering that the system is free-of-charge and resources such as gynaes need to be distributed according to the level of complication of the pregnancy. Having said that, I think that the midwives here are generally very professional, reassuring and as capable as gynaes in dealing with most general antenatal conditions.

The system's workload is split between the hospital's maternity department and the General Practices (i.e. clinics). For a typical problem-free pregnancy, the antenatal checkups are as follow:

• First booking Checkup : Hospital
• Level 2 Detailed Checkup (21/22 weeks) : Hospital
• 24th week : General Practice
• 28th week : General Practice
• 30th week : Checkup at General Practice + Bloodtest to be done in Hospital
• 32th week: General Practice
• 34th week: General Practice
• 36th week : Hospital (Detailed checkup)
• 38th week: General Practice
• 40th week: General Practice
• 41th week: Hospital

What happens is that every two weeks, midwives would be dispatched to the local (non-private) General Practices and conduct antenatal clinics. So all I need to do during those odd weeks would be to visit my local clinic to have my urine sample checked (for sugar level), blood pressure checked, as well as for the midwife to physically feel my abdomen to determine if the size and position of the baby is normal.

We visited our local clinic this morning for the first of our regular checkup with the midwife at the GP. The midwife commented that all was normal and my bloodpressure recorded exactly the same as when it was last checked in the hospital. I told her that maybe because I do not work, I am therefore not too stressed, so it should be quite normal and constant...she laughed! :)

Whilst we may not have the luxury of a sonogram image scan in the clinic, the midwife had brought out a doppler. A doppler is a device which employs ultrasound to listen to the fetal heart, via the abdomen. We had only used to see Bambino's heartbeat on the ultrasound imaging system, but never had the chance to actually hear it! So, for the first time, we heard his heartbeat loud, clear and fast! One can see the heartrate recorded every second through the doppler's digital screen and Bambino measured the normal rate of between 110 - 160 beat per minute. The midwife explained that as babies are growing fast, their heatrates would normally be twice as fast as normal adults.

YL and myself were pretty intrigued by bambino's heartbeat resonating from the doppler...they certainly sound like drumbeats! :)