From their 18th floor apartment, the view over the Inner Harbour is magnificent. The rent was more than they were expecting to pay, Michelle Whitney explains, but seeing the view on a clear January night and knowing that it comes fully furnished, the couple who had just moved from England with their 2-year-old daughter and a suitcase of clothes each decided to take it. John McGarvey is a chief financial officer who rides his bike from James Bay to his Victoria workplace and regularly works 12-hour days, and Michelle is a teacher who is taking a brake from her career for an undetermined length of time to pursue the more rewarding and interesting position of full-time mother.

Michelle’s parents and family who live here are what drew her and her new family back to Canada after her 4-1/2-year stay in England where she met and married John. The defining moment for Michelle’s decision to return to Canada was Keeley’s illness when she was only 5-months old, standing in the hospital calling Michelle’s mom on her cell phone (at about 5 pounds/minute) telling her that her granddaughter might die from a colon problem. Her mother was on the next available flight over, but it still took her 48 hours to arrive from Canada. Since coming back to the island, the sense of family has benefited both Michelle and Keeley. After her surgery, Keeley had 9 inches less bowel inside her and struggled to put on any weight from the food she ate. Michelle has noticed that with the settled life in James Bay and their regular routine, Keeley has become more relaxed and comfortable and has been able to gain adequate weight, despite most of her fruits and vegetables “shooting right through her,” as Michelle descriptively puts it.

After a childhood on the move and continuing to move every couple of years, Michelle expected to still feel the traveling itch at regular intervals, but she has found that motherhood has settled her and kept her more content than she has ever been.

England, Michelle shares, is not at all kid friendly. She says that there are no change tables anywhere and requests for a high chair in a restaurant is met with eye rolling and drama. Ireland, on the other hand, welcomes babies, kids and families with open arms. The 5-star hotels and restaurants are all accommodating and have “baby bowl dinners” on the menu that are bowls of simple vegetable soup or mashed potatoes.

The one thing about England that was kid friendly were the pubs! Children came to the pubs, including the 16th century, charming pubs and had family days and everyone was able to enjoy very good pub food. (Victoria has quite an opposite approach to kids and pubs. When Steve tried to take Natasha to the pub when she was 2 weeks old and asleep in her car seat, he was told that he was not allowed to bring her in, that she is a minor. He joked that she was the designated driver, but the pub employee said, without a smile, that they can loose their liquor license.)

I shared my surprise with Michelle’s observations, as I know that England is famous for its availability of midwives. It turns out, though, that each midwife is assigned as many as 40 women who they have to see all in 1 or 2 days of clinics. Her own midwife could not keep Michelle straight. Her chart had her down as 160 kilos, rather than 160 pounds. So her “clinically obese” classification on her chart was wrong and potentially dangerous. (We all know how busy hospital nurses are and there is a chance that a nurse, who had never and would never see Michelle would look at her chart and measure out the amount of medication that a clinically obese 160 kilo woman would need. This much going into a 160 pound pregnant woman could create some serious problems.) It took Michelle 4 visits and 4 attempts to have this corrected.

Michelle appreciates the system and the concept behind the medical community’s approach to birth: birthing centres, very open minds about how a woman chooses (and her unquestioned right to make her own choice, whatever it is), and midwives (who, as our midwife pointed out, are specialists) for everyone. They do have some policies that did not do Michelle any favours, though. Once you go into labour and a midwife or nurse examines you, they must deliver you within 24 hours. And for Michelle, whose labour took 3 days, this meant every drug and hormone possible, a couple of epidurals that did not work, an episiotomy after she specifically told them that she did not want an episiotomy, an English-is-her-second-language doctor. After a long, horrible stay in the hospital, Michelle had her baby, Keeley vaginally.
That night in the hospital, stark naked and with her new baby on her chest (they take the “bonding is important” concept to the next level and leave the baby on the mama all night), when a nurse came in with a damp cloth to wipe Michelle down, she told the nurse that she felt something funny in her back. The nurse had a look and said, “oh yes, that’s the epidural.” someone had neglected to remove the needle from her back. Her  catheter was left in all night. Michelle told the nurse every hour that she felt wet, that something funny was happening down below. The nurse told her that it was probably just sweat and that it was nothing to be concerned about. When a nurse finally turned on the light, they saw that it was not sweat (Michelle had no clothes on and was freezing) but blood. The nurse said that she was going to go get a doctor, but first took the wet, blood-soaked mattress pad out and put a new one down, not bothering to clean the blood off Michelle’s body.

This was the last straw. At 5:00 am, Michelle took her cell phone out of her purse and called her mom from the hospital bed. She told her mom that she and John had to come to the hospital and take her home immediately. After trying to convince her daughter that it would be fine, the vehemence in her daughter’s voice convinced her to come to the hospital. At 7:00 in the morning, her mother came barging in to the mother-babe ward, demanding to see her daughter. The nurses informed her that visiting hours don’t start until 10:00, but that did not deter this determined woman. She informed the staff, in her robust voice, that “I don’t think you people understand; I just flew in from Canada and I am going to see my daughter. Michelle! Michelle where are you?”

Her mother had to take Michelle out of the bed, convince a nurse to take the catheter out, which should have been removed 6 hours earlier and had now caused an infection, shower her, dress her, and help her fight with the nurses to let her out. They wanted her to stay for another 48 hours, but Michelle checked herself out and got her and her baby out of there.

I asked if she had spoken to many other new moms and if this was a common experience. She said that the others she met in her prenatal yoga class all had similar hospital stays and even women in Victoria who she has met who had their baby in the UK were familiar with her tale. The overworked and understaffed maternal system has created this as the norm.

Michelle did appreciate, though, that the midwife then comes to your house every day for 2 weeks following birth. Even with this extra attention, though, she told the midwives for two weeks that she was still bleeding, then told her doctor for the next six weeks (eight weeks postpartum) that she was still bleeding. After being told repeatedly that it was normal and that she was just getting her period, she finally demanded that she be examined. Her instincts were right, as the doctor found that she still had 8 cm of placenta inside her. She had to have a dilation and curettage (D&C) which was followed by an intense feeling pressure in her abdomen. The nurse told her that this was normal, but when Michelle said that she felt she had to have a bowel movement and then used a bedpan, a huge blood clot passed out. The nurse told her nonchalantly that this would make her feel better, and after looking down to see blood everywhere, Michelle lost consciousness and only woke up after another trip to the operating room and three blood transfusions. This is not so normal…

Within a week of this latest episode of new motherhood, Michelle had decided that she was getting out of the country and returning to Canada and her parents for some much needed help and recovery time. It took three months of counseling to get over these traumas. She is able to stay very understanding and forgiving, though, saying that the midwives, nurses and doctors are all good people, just desperately understaffed and overworked. She and her new family did return to England only to have more medical experiences, this time with Keeley.

Michelle was very impressed with the pediatric care and the level of their care and points out that they have the population to support first-rate facilities and doctors. When Keeley was five months old, she had three days of moaning and complaining. Michelle thought it was teething, so gave her infant Tylenol and did not worry about it. But then on the forth day when Keeley woke up vomiting and with diarrhea, Michelle knew that something was wrong. John did not want to stay home from work, but Michelle’s instincts were so strong that she insisted that he stay home and they go to the hospital at 6:00 in the morning.

The doctor who first met them decided to take them upstairs to the pediatrician who was on call. When they went to weigh her, Michelle took Keeley’s diaper off and it was full of blood. This was how they knew things were going downhill. If Michelle had waited any longer, Keeley would have hemorrhaged to death. The ambulance ride to London followed immediately where they were met at the door. Only two children in England have such a severe case each year, and the doctors explained that babies who are weaned too early (as Keeley was because of all Michelle’s problems and bleeding) can have this problem. Keeley was in surgery within 4 hours and had 9 inches of her bowel removed.

The terminal illium is now missing, the part of the digestive system that slows food down and removes the last of the nutrients before the waste passes into the colon. When this part of the gut is dying, it tries to get rid of all that is in it, which is why Keeley woke up vomiting and with diarrhoea. The pediatric surgeon recommended that Keeley eat a bag of chips every day. Our kidneys and liver function from the salt that we get out of our food. Keeley’s salt removal system, the terminal illium, is missing.

After a failed initial attempt to put her on salt solution and then the suggestion of putting salt in juice (for a 5 month old) or formula, the doctor just suggested chips and salty pretzels and snacks. Michelle honoured this recommendation for a while, but has noticed that now that Keeley is 2 ½, she does not need to eat as much salt. Keeley still cannot digest many green vegetables or fresh fruit, but her digestive system is slowly getting better. They were told that it could return to normal within three months, or it could take three years, or it could never get back to normal and she could have problems her whole life. Michelle has observed that her daughter is doing much better.

I asked Michelle what the two biggest differences were in lifestyle and parenting between Canada and England, one being what we did right and England should adopt and the other being what England did right and Canada needs to follow. She says that Canada is far more active and outdoors based and our children are much more physically fit than they are in England. The population density and lack of rural spaces in the UK make it hard for easy access to daily sports; even riding your bike with your child on the back or in a trailer is not done. We bring our children skiing or kayaking with us from an early age and we walk more. England is having a huge obesity problem now. Their idea of vacationing is to go to an all-inclusive resort that serves bangars and mash and meat pies, all the English traditional foods rather than the authentic diet and experiences of where they have traveled to.

As for the English lifestyle, Michelle misses the local, fresh, seasonal food options there. The 50-mile diet does not have this name over there because that is how they have been eating for centuries and it is not a new concept. She went to a local butcher, whose name she knew, to buy her freshly cut meats, and to a small green grocer where she could only find seasonal foods, some of which she had never tried or cooked before. She became much more adventurous with her food choices and preparation. She acknowledges that in Canada there is a movement towards this way of eating, but you have to drive a lot farther and it is not yet the norm or accepted standard.

I asked about the English approach to introducing food to babies. She says that they are far more relaxed about it than we in North America are with our charts and dates and handouts. What the parents eat, the children eat. She does wonder if this may partly be contributing to the childhood obesity, but says that the European influence of what to give your baby and child to eat and drink provides babies with far more options and more flavour than we have here. In France, for example, if you go to the baby food isle you won’t find the bland-tasting, limited options we have here, but much more flavourful and interesting textures like cream of asparagus soup or eggplant puree that tasted good. There were no preservatives, so you have to eat it within a week. She also misses the bounty of organic foods, where Canada is still lagging behind. The prices there are very reasonable; for example, organic milk is only 30 cents more than conventionally grown milk.

After such an unbelievable first year, Michelle is not sure if she will have another child. Though it took a few months for her to get into the groove of motherhood, she now loves being a mom and is happier than she ever was before. Hearing about her strength (which is evident in her voice and the way she carries herself when you meet her), her commitment to her daughter and her love of her new life role, this is one mama bear to watch and not get in the way of!