Until fairly recently, obstetricians were in favour of routinely giving episiotomies to labouring women during childbirth. However, the WHO guidelines clearly state that episiotomies should not be routinely performed. If you’re keen to have a normal delivery, you should know when you might require an episiotomy, what it entails and how long the recovery and…
Would you hop on to an 8-hour flight if it meant you could try for a normal delivery? Priyanka Singh, who was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM), did exactly that. Priyanka and her husband, Arun, work at the Indian Embassy in Cairo and when she entered her seventh month, they made the decision to…
High levels of air pollution can have an adverse effect in pregnancy. In a city like Delhi – which is amongst the most polluted cities of the world – the high levels of pollutants in the air are a grave concern. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), poor air quality is directly linked with…
When Divya Singh went for an ultrasound in her 37th week, she was told that she should have an elective cesarean section because her baby had a double loop of cord around neck. She couldn’t help wondering ‘Is normal delivery possible with cord around the neck?’.
If you ask Viji Vijayan about her birthing experience, perhaps your first reaction to her story will be full of surprise. We don’t meet too many mothers who stay so zen when their labour begins with their water breaking. “I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and all…
Pregnant women in Delhi considering a normal delivery have probably heard one or all of these lines before. “You’re too overweight to have a normal delivery.” “Why do you want to give birth yourself? A Caesarean will be so much easier.” And perhaps the most common line of all: “You’ve already had a Caesarean once….
Recently, one of our obstetric consultants met a mother with a 3-year old baby in her clinic. She was a playful and happy little baby but had a few characteristic features that set her apart. Payal had all the class signs of a baby with Downs Syndrome – a small chin, slanted eyes, a flat nasal…
Deliveries by caesarean section have been steadily rising in Delhi and across India over the last decade. And the reasons behind their rise are not always medically sound. Sometimes, women elect to have a caesarean because they’re afraid of labour pains; but with the proper support in the labour room, women can successfully have a…
There was a time when Indian cooking was a great nutrition source for a pregnancy diet. We knew that if we ate our greens and our lauki, increased our whole-grain intake through rotis and dalia and kept a healthy intake of dairy products going, we wouldn’t have much to worry about. However, in the last decade or so, our lifestyles have changed…