Blogger sucks. sorry.

So I have been wondering why I get no comments on my blog, not even from Justin, who I know reads it. So I asked him. As it turns out, you need to have a blogger account (I think gmail will work too) in order to leave a comment! It used to be that you could leave a comment as 'anonymous' and not have to sign in to anything. Anyway, what a pain in the ass. I harbour no hard feelings for receiving no comments. I blame it all on blogger.

Vitamin K injections? with a short note about the inadequacy of the Canadian voting system

All babies born in hospitals (and many born at home) are given a vitamin K injection at birth to prevent hemorrhagic disease of the newborn (HDN). This is one that i'm kind of stuck on.

HDN - Newborns are born with low levels of vitamin K (it doesn't cross the placenta well, and their gut flora is not well developed, which is where much of our vitamin K comes from), a necessary factor in clotting. It developes more often in breastfed babies, since formula contains higher levels of vitamin K than breastmilk does. From what I can find, it affects anwhere from 2-10 babies per 100,000, but it can be deadly since bleeding can happed in the brain. With the injection, rates can go as low as 0.25 babies per 100,000.

There might be some problems with the injection. Two studies done in the 90's (and several since then) linked vitamin K injection at birth to higher rate of childhood leukemia later on, but other studies have not found this connection. Vitamin K causes high rates of cell division in the fetus and newborn. The amount in the injection is about 20,000 times the amount naturally found in the baby. This high rate of cell division so close after birth is though to be what increases the risk of cancer. The risk of cancer is increased somewhere between 10-80%. It has been given to babies since the 60's in western countries. Apparantly, it can also cause newborn jaundice (although i couldn't find any studies to back that up).

The main reason that I wouldn't do it, is it just doesn't seem natural to me. I don't understand how evolution could have gotten it wrong. There is one alternative to the injection (oral administration) which has not been studied to show that it actually decreases HDN or to see if it still causes cancer (at least not that I can find). Lots of natural health websites seem to prefer the oral route, but without any evidence either way, I would kind of prefer the evil I know to the evil I don't.

Any opinions on the matter are greatly appreciated.

By the way, the midwife told me at our last appointment that the baby has dropped (kind of). If you imagine your pelvis divided into 5th's, 1/5 being baby kind of floating just inside the pelvis and 5/5 being the baby right at the cervix, this baby is now at 3/5. It is my prediction that this baby is not going to wait until Oct 27. Maybe it will be Oct 14. Maddy was born just days before a federal election too, and I COULDN'T VOTE!! If I left the hospital to vote, they would not let me back, and since Maddy wasn't being released yet, and I was breastfeeding, that wasn't really an option. I think its stupid that people in hospitals can't vote (unless they vote early, or by mail, but I could do neither). Anyway, that's a different topic alltogether.

We are our own solution.

I think that our society has become too dependent on others to solve our problems for us. My recent insomnia will be my example. I have not been sleeping well (never more than 4-5 hours a night) for a few weeks now. That kind of sleep deprivation really takes its toll on you physically, and emotionally. I would find myself totally losing it, over nothing, just from sheer exhaustion. I didn't have the energy to do anything, so I would often end up doing nothing but the bare minimum (laundry only when we ran out of underwear etc etc) every day, and feeling worse as each day passed. I can see how many women end up depressed in late pregnancy/postpartum. Lack of sleep will do that to you! Anyway, I went to Calgary withmy Mum this past weekend, to do some serious shopping/eating. It was awesome, and we were on our feet, walking around all day Saturday and Sunday and guess what? I slept like a baby! All this time, I have been asking my midwife what I can take (herbal teas, etc) to help me sleep, when really all it took was enough exercise to beat me out. I expected the solution to this problem to come from some outside source, when it was in me all along to fix this. I wonder how much better everyone would feel if they got out for a nice, long walk everyday. So i'm going to start walking the dog. It has been Justin's job the last few months, but I obviously need the exercise. I think the solutions to many (most?) of our health problems are already there, we just need to get off the couch and do it.

On a side note, the baby's room (aka. junk room for the last 6 months) is starting to take shape. I actually cleaned out some of the junk today, put blankets away and gave us some room to work. Now Justin can put the crib together. I need to find a nice quilt for the crib, so I can start some kind of decorating scheme in there. Rental house beige just doesn't do it for me.

Six weeks to go! (Although my internal clock is telling me it might be sooner.)

Too many tests

I had forgotten how many tests pregnant women take. Pee tests, blood tests, glucose level tests, vaginal exams, Group B Strep tests, etc etc. Cathy (midwife) is obligated to offer me all of the tests that are available (and in fact mandatory, if I were under the care of most docters) and I have started to decline all of them. I still pee on a stick every few weeks to check for protein and glucose (i think?) but I find these fairly unobtrusive. No ultrasounds, no blood tests, no group B strep test, no vaginal exams, no gestational diabetes tests. If pregnancy was that bad for you, we would not have a population problem. I think the tests themselves may be part of the problem to begin with.

Lets take group B strep. Here is a bacteria found in a quater of women. In Canada, they test everyone for it around 36 weeks. One problem with this is that your status (positive or negative for the bacteria) can change, so a + or - at 36 weeks does not mean you are + or - when you give birth. If you are + when you give birth, your baby has a REALLY small chance of getting sick (very sick though, it kills 1 in 10 babies it infects). Things that increase the risk to the baby include:
-breaking the water artificially (done in almost all labours in the
hospital to speed it up) and
-having multiple vaginal exams during pregnancy/labour (I have not had one, nor will I have one, even when i'm in labour, unless something is wrong, or really unclear. i'm sure the docter "checked me" at least once an hour during labour, and at every
appointment when I was pregnant with Maddy.)
There are other risk factors as well, but the others cannot be controlled (such as preterm labour, and your water breaking more than 18 hours before the baby is born). Maybe we could lower the risk to babies by not having docters stick their hands inside you every chance they get!

Anyway, pregnancy is normal, and there is no need for me to be poked, prodded and "checked" to make sure everything is going properly. The chances of it not going properly are pretty low, and there are other signs for how well a labour is doing besides how your cervix is. This whole midwife thing feels so much better than having a docter ever did. I am more comfortable/confident with her care than I was with the docter. Justin is actually going to be able to be part of it, instead of just watching it unfold, and I will be able to feel like i'm a part of it, instead of just a tool in the delivery of this baby. Of course, maybe i'm totally deluding myself as to my abilities of pain managment, but we'll see :)

My 4am ramblings

Over the past few months, I have been doing a lot of reading on homebirth, and midwifery care, and there is quite a political movement going on right now (with good reason) to get midwifery care accepted by the medical establishment and funded by the government. This can sometimes make it a little tough to separate fact from rumour when it comes to the actual medical benefits of midwifery care to the mother and baby. One area of research where i'm finding this so is in the research linking the use of pitocin to brain development in the baby later in life.


Pitocin is used in a huge number of births in Canada (and around the world) to induce labour, or to speed it up when docters think it is going too slowly. I had it with Maddy after the epidural effectively stopped my labour. Almost all my friends who I know have had it with their babies, even those who have given birth in what are supposed to be "intervention free" birth centers. It is the synthetic version of a natural hormone produced during labour (for one, its also released during orgasm. Example of a full circle, I think :). Anyway here is the wikipedia article on oxytocin, if anyone cares http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin I can't find anything better right now, but it is 4 am and I can't sleep, so it will have to do.


Pitocin does not cross the blood-brain barrier in adults, and docters have always assumed that it is the same for the baby, but they are starting to realize that a fetus' brain does not work quite the same as ours (duh) and things that don't affect our brain, affect theirs (again, duh). They have no idea, nor have they done much research into what long term effects there may be on brain development by giving the baby HUGE quantities of hormone during birth. One thing they are starting to look at is connection between Autism and pitocin induction/augmentation at birth. Some say there is no connection ( 1, abstract only, sorry, I don't have subscriptions to these journals. I'll have to use my university connections and get them emailed to me sometime when i'm feeling ambitious)
Many/most others agree there is enough evidence to warrant a big-time study (2, 3, 4, 5) which I have yet to find. Here are a few non-scholerly articles I found interesting...
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/autism/article/10168/57071
http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/ATTN_Researchers.htm

Anyway, it makes sense to me. Oxytoxin is known to be a major player in autism once it develops so it seems natural to me that it may play a role in development of this disorder as well. Of course, i'm having a homebirth, so this already puts me on the fringe and makes my ideas "crunchy" (thanks Vicky, for introducing me to that term). It's now 5 am, so i'm going back to bed.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12757361
2. J Autism Dev Disord. 1993 Sep;23(3):567-9
3. Med Hypotheses. 2004;63(3):456-60
4. Am J Psychiatry 1997; 154:438-9
5. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2004 Jun;61(6):618-27.

Summer is over, time to get back to reality.

So my 2 month break on this blog is over. I was so busy with the little boys I was watching this summer (watching other people's kids is way harder than watching your own!), that I neglected this blog, but no more! I will faithfully write everyday (or three) about interesting topics (probably not so much) and post new pictures.

But first.... to catch everyone up on the summer goings-on in Edmonton...

It was a busy summer. The Sasquatch Gathering at Pembina River was great, it will now be an annual event for our family I think. Edmonton Folk Festival was also awesome, another keeper. The Taste of Edmonton Festival, Street Performers Festival, Fringe Festival etc etc were all good times. Maddy got picked to go up on stage twice at the Fringe for being the cute little kid in the front row.

The hot days here were a bit too hot for me, I spent a fair number of days in the hammock in the backyard under the apple tree, just swinging back and forth, playing with the various children (our backyard became the neighbourhood hangout for the 3-6 crowd).

We also got a bunch of donations this summer! Yay! THANK YOU!! to Vicky, Amie and Jason, Michelle and Shawn, Mandy, and Anita.

Hope that everyone had a wonderful summer :)

Love to all

Leah.