Yesterday: I had three doctor or midwife appointments, all before noon. One of them got cancelled due to time crunch. Then I had to rush back here (Priest River, about 45 minutes away)to meet my friend, who was picking up some goats to take to the sale in Lewiston. She and I and another gal all pooled a handful of goats each to make the trip worthwhile, with each of us also pitching in for the gas. I was apprehensive, because I could only think of one or two does that I wanted to get rid of...and she needed to take more than that (and of course, I needed to sell more than that). Well, unbeknownst to me, one of the does I had in mind had expired a month before. She simply wasn't there. Nevertheless, we located a number of candidates in pretty short time, and I ended up sending seven off. There are still three buck kids (two for meat and one for potential breeding stock sale) and my oldest queen doe(to be sent away to retire at a nice place). After that I will have about only twenty left, which is quite a bit more managable. Best of all, I didn't cry or feel bad or guilty this time. The ones I sent weren't special and I won't miss them...some of them had bad attitudes and were troublemakers. One had hooked another doe's collar with her horns and was proceeding to drag her captive around the pen choking!! She went....and good riddance, too!

After that we had to run and pick up my daughter from her school, and then hurry back in time for me to go to work until 8 at night. It was a hectic day...but I'm glad that the excess goat problem was resolved a bit.

Also--> is this retarded or what?! Apparently Bonner General hospital will not allow a VBAC (vaginal birth after Ceasarian) for any reason, unless you are actually crowning (i.e, the baby is coming out) when you step into the door of the hospital. They say the liability for a VBAC is too high. This iritates me to no end. My first birth was a C-section, for reasons totally unlikely to recur. I have since had four normal vaginal births, three of which were at home. Yet, if I go to the hospital, I am too high risk to have a vaginal birth and they will force me to have another C-section!!! ::IRK::

The whole reason I was considering even the remote possibility of a hospital birth is that I had some serious cardiac arrhythmia during my last labor and birth. I was too close to having the baby to be moved to a hospital by then..moving me would have been riskier then just following through at that point, and we both came through it OK. If I start to have the arrhythmia again during this pregnancy (as I did last time) I would just as soon take the hospital route just in case....because I don't want to die just yet, thanks...and my net research indicates that this problem tends to get worse with each successive pregnancy. However, the thought of going under anesthesia and getting a C-section with a severely irregular heartbeat scares the living crap out of me!!! The whole idea was to have less risk, not more....

Groan...Newport hospital (Washington, just over the border) is apparently the only alternative nearby. Newport has such an abyssmal reputation that people go 30 miles further to Sandpoint because we are, almost across the board, from what I can tell, scared silly of going to Newport unless it is an absolute last resort. I can't think of anyone who voluntarily chooses to go there except under duress or for an emergency. It's actually kind of amazing that they're still in business.

I have no idea what I am going to do, other than another home birth and accepting the attendant risk involved.