Ante natal classes get a bit samey after a while. Each class is split into two parts, an hour with a midwife pushing dolls through plastic pelvises, and an hour with a physiotherapist who talks about breathing. We put ourselves down for the evening classes so that Lynne doesn’t have to take afternoons off work. They run from 6 to 8 on Tuesdays. The midwife keeps telling us that if we are coming straight from work we should bring sandwiches. The hospital provides horrible juice and custard creams. I haven’t seen custard creams for years. They probably buy them especially to fit in with the Queen Mum’s seventies idiom.
Don’t get me wrong; the Queen Mum’s is good. Everyone is nice and the place is clean. But the truth is that they are running it down. They were going to sell it, merge it with the Southern General, knock the building down and build flats, but then the bottom fell out of the economy. Now it just sits on Yorkhill, desperate for some love and attention. There are blue and brown walls and scuffed orange lino floors, single pane windows rattling in their peeling frames, dingy corridors lit by grainy yellow bulbs, cheap plastic seats worn white by years of arses. The ultrasound machine looks as out of its time as a spaceship in an Egyptian tomb. The place is a maze and it echoes as if it is already dead.
There is life on the maternity ward. At the fourth class we are taken on a tour of the wards. Everyone keeps telling us it’s hot in there, and they are right, it is hot. We queue up at a bright green antibacterial hand rub dispenser on the way in. Women in labour shuffled about in dressing gowns, hands on the small of their backs. A nurse smiles from behind a desk. We take turns to peer through a glass door a newborn baby, 45 minutes old, pink, tiny, sleeping. This is all starting to seem pretty real now.
Don’t get me wrong; the Queen Mum’s is good. Everyone is nice and the place is clean. But the truth is that they are running it down. They were going to sell it, merge it with the Southern General, knock the building down and build flats, but then the bottom fell out of the economy. Now it just sits on Yorkhill, desperate for some love and attention. There are blue and brown walls and scuffed orange lino floors, single pane windows rattling in their peeling frames, dingy corridors lit by grainy yellow bulbs, cheap plastic seats worn white by years of arses. The ultrasound machine looks as out of its time as a spaceship in an Egyptian tomb. The place is a maze and it echoes as if it is already dead.
There is life on the maternity ward. At the fourth class we are taken on a tour of the wards. Everyone keeps telling us it’s hot in there, and they are right, it is hot. We queue up at a bright green antibacterial hand rub dispenser on the way in. Women in labour shuffled about in dressing gowns, hands on the small of their backs. A nurse smiles from behind a desk. We take turns to peer through a glass door a newborn baby, 45 minutes old, pink, tiny, sleeping. This is all starting to seem pretty real now.
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