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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Anonymous wrote:
Just out of curiosity, for any L and D nurses out there: provided a normal, laboring woman has been able to drink fluids as desired, how often does this happen? My OB said she required at least the heplock because she'd seen too many ugly cases like this, but I know that midwives "allow" food and drink as desired. Answers, people with more education than I?[/quote]

Its VERY doubtful that your OB "had seen too many cases like these" since hospitals pressure almost everyone to have a heplock. I know several ob/gyns and they freely admit that they overstate things to get the patient to make the right choice without freaking them out with the real behind the scenes facts. Ironically, the fact that it doesn't happen very often is why they prefer the heplock to be in place. Nursing skills vary by department. An ER or trauma nurse who is not an expert at placing an IV in all types of situations would be eaten alive by her fellow nurses and then fired or advised to switch to another department. ER nurses also get lots of practice inserting IV's in bad situations with bad veins. IV skills are not paramount for ob/gyn nurses and quite frankly many of them aren't very good at it even in a fully hydrated, compliant patient with normal veins. The ob/gyn nurses get very little if any exposure to placing IV's in an emergency situation so you would lose time.

I remembered this when I had my child and my nurse took 15 minutes and several tries to get the IV/heplock in place. I certainly would not have wanted to rely on her to place an IV in an emergency. [/quote]

Honestly, at the time I didn't think she'd seen "too many" if she were being honest and imagined that the was an "ulterior" motive, in addition to that just being the hospital policy. It still doesn't seem like the majority of women would ever need an IV and I still come down on the side that getting an IV or saline lock as a general matter of course is not good medicine. Thanks for the answer. If you have an other "secrets" your OB friends have shared, would you mind spinning off another thread? I'd be very curious.[/quote]

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