Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 October 2005 10:28:18
I don't mean the long-term, psychotherapeutic sort, I mean the in-a-crisis, this-scan-shows-your-baby-has-spina-bifida sort.
After the scan in question, we were ushered into a very pink room (after I‘d dashed off to the loo, as I wrote about earlier!). I knew we were in trouble as there was a box of tissues on the table. (Although, actually, there was also what I can only describe as an *ahem* magazine. Does the Pink Room have other uses?)
We were joined by a midwife and our consultant. (I must pause here to say that the consultant is a very very lovely man, and was brilliant, and looked after me wonderfully for the whole of the pregnancy, and I can't say enough nice things about him.) They proceeded to counsel us, I suppose.
The consultant was, as ever, lovely. He gave us facts about spina bifida, was honest about what he could and couldn't tell us on the basis of the scan, and talked about quality of life for people with spina bifida. Then he said “do you want to talk about termination?” and we said “no”, and it was never mentioned again.
The midwife was much more ‘counsel-ly', if you know what I mean. I've trained, and done a bit of this type of counselling (in a local crisis pregnancy centre: how ironic is that?), and I could see her empathising, reflecting and summarising away. It drove mr birdie NUTS. His reaction to her caring, big-eyed empathy was pretty much: “you're not my friend, you don't know me, you don't care about this in any meaningful sense. Shut up and let me go and talk to my real friends about this.” (I must add he didn't say this out loud). He just saw it all as totally insincere.
Mr birdie would rather, and I am not exaggerating this at all, he would rather they said: “your baby has spina bifida. This is what it means, now go away and deal with it.”
I'm not for a moment assuming that most people think like mr birdie. In fact I'm pretty sure they don't. And I'm also aware that we are very very lucky in terms of having incredibly supportive family and friends, who we could go to, and who laughed and cried with us through that time.
The thing is, it made me think about the times when I've been in the position of the counsellor. I don't think I was ever insincere, in fact when you're in that situation you do care about the person you're talking to and what they're going through. But the fact remains, it was never me who would be there with them still a year, five years, ten years later. I wasn't their friend, I was just some woman who was on duty when they came in to the centre.
Hmm. This has gone very rambly, and I'm not sure if I've articulated very well what I'm trying to get at. It just made me question the value of that type of crisis management counselling. But then, a couple of months later, a friend of ours had a miscarriage, and ended up being counselled, possibly even in the same pink room. They were full of how wonderful the midwife had been and how caring. So obviously it worked well for them.
I guess the most important task then, for somebody counselling in that situation, is to assess what type of person you have here in front of you, and what approach will work best for them. It's a tough job, and having been on the receiving end, I don't think I'm planning to go back to it.
Ramble ramble.