Hairdressers and statistics

What's that old saying? Can't live 'em, can't live without 'em. Yep, that applies to hairdressers for sure.

Over the last twenty years of my life, I've always spent a considerable amount of time and money looking for the "perfect" hairdresser. Someone who understands where I'm coming from, someone who I like, and someone who does spectacular things with my hair. Obviously, these demands are considerable, and it usually takes me some time to find a suitable candidate.

Once I've found that "perfect" hairdresser, of course I'd stick to her like glue and hope that she wouldn't move away. But, as with all things in life, hairdressers don't stay. Always, always, always, my perfect hairdresser would move. Or I would. And then the search would be on again.

In the last two years, my husband and I have just gone to our local hairdresser. I say local because they're around the corner, but in actual fact there are probably about 10 hairdressing salons within a 100 metre radius of our apartment. This is the only one where you can walk in without making an appointment and they are by far the cheapest. I find I don't care all that much about the perfect hairdresser since Freyja died.

The problem with this less-than-perfect hairdressing salon is that the staff don't make the same effort to know me and remember me as they would in a salon which would charge three or four times as much. This means I often have the same conversations with the various staff who work there. The staff are generally very young (early-mid 20's), come from the outer suburbs and are covered with tatoos. (I love tatoos, I have one myself, but these are girls are COVERED with tatoos.) In other words, we don't have much in common (except for our tatoos ...).

Yesterday, Craig and I both went to get our hair cut.

Naturally, a polite topic of conversation was my pregnancy. I didn't bring it up, she did (not surprisingly, I'm 32 weeks tomorrow). She asked whether everything was ready and set up. I said no. She was surprised. I explained that this was my third pregnancy and we'd had some bad luck with previous pregnancies. She said, but surely nothing could still go wrong now?

Right.

This is what the whole bloody world thinks. And it drives me absolutely batty. There's an implication here that in other pregnancies, normal pregnancies, nothing would go wrong now.

So I explained to her that my two previous pregnancies were also normal until my daughter died at 28 weeks gestation for no reason. That my son Kees died when he was 7 weeks old from a bloody VIRUS which had no symptoms. That he was that one in 40,000 newborns. And that in fact many bad things can happen to babies in late pregnancy. (I could have thrown in some statistics about stillbirth and the reasons for it, but I got the impression that she wouldn't have believed me anyway. As if I would make up this sort of thing.)

But it was like talking to the wind. She was politely listening to me (her customer) but I could see it made no impact on her at all. She probably thought I was a paranoid middle-aged mother-to-be. One of the side-effects of the less-than-perfect hairdresser.

And then sometimes you meet the other person. The person who knows what you're talking about. Who has some idea of what you've gone through.

Craig came off his bike about one and a half years ago (an English tourist stepped out on to the bike path in front of him). The injury has never healed and he's been receiving weekly physio treatment ever since.

His physio, a lovely Dutch girl in her early 30's, knows about our babies. Craig recently found out that her sister's first pregnancy also ended in tragedy. When she was 26w5d pregnant she went into premature labour. There was no apparent reason for her premature labour. Her baby girl was born, but she and her partner were told that as her baby's gestation was less than 27 weeks, the hospital staff would not take any measures to save the baby. She held her LIVING, BREATHING baby girl in her arms for 10 minutes and watched her die. UNBELIEVABLE. Later investigations showed there was nothing wrong with the baby. In Australia, everything that could have been done, would have been done. There is a very strong possibility that her baby would have lived if she had been born in Australia. And all because of "policy". (This girl has since had a living baby and is now pregnant with her third. She has not been, and still is not, treated as a high-risk case.) [As an aside, this baby girl was not given a birth certificate, she was/is not a person, and she was not given a funeral -- she was treated like hospital waste ... Not surprisingly this woman is still trying to deal with the trauma of birthing her daughter, losing her daughter, and not having her daughter acknowledged as a "person". This happened about three years ago ... doesn't it just make your blood BOIL???]

There was recently an article published in an expat magazine, which stated that the numbers in the Netherlands for stillbirth (from between 22 weeks gestation until four weeks after birth) were 1 in 100.

(see: http://www.expatica.com/nl/health_fitness/healthcare/Don_t-blame-it-on-home-births.html?ppager=0.)

The numbers everywhere else in the world are about 1 in 140 (and that's from 20 weeks gestation until four weeks after birth).

Now I know why the risks are so much greater here. It's because of bloody POLICY.

I have to tell you that this country's medical system absolutely SUCKS.