Delivering at Queen Elizabeth hospital

[Aquarian]

djudju, you *will* probably be hungry after eating their food as you don't get much. It's worth taking some sweet and savoury snacks in your bag so you don't need to wait for your husband.

 

[karhu]

Agree, pack snacks with you and tell your hubby to bring you food also as you might be quite hungry and you should eat when you ate hungry to help you recover and get nutrition needed for lactation!

You can get a shot of pain killer if no epidural is available .... I somehow angled to deliver the baby without anything with the encouragement from the midwives so hopefully all will go smoothly with you!!

 

[charade]

Thank you all for your answers and for sharing your experience.
As for me, food is the last thing I'd worry about because I know a hospital is not a restaurant/hotel so my expectations are not high. If I'm still hungry after I eat their food, I'll ask my husband to bring some more food and that's it.

The most important for me is the quality of care my baby and I will receive, and from what I can read, there's nothing to worry about.
For $100/day, what we can get in a public hospital is satisfactory.

My only concern is still about getting an epidural because I've heard mothers not being able to get one because the anaesthesist was too busy :-(
Giving birth to a first baby is not easy since I don't know what to expect, it's the unknown. But not being sure of getting what I request makes things more complicated and it worries me... I keep on praying so that everything goes smoothly on the D-day...

About the epidural, the advice I got from the doctor at one of my antenatal check-ups at Tseung Kwan O hospital is to ask for it when you register and again when you're brought into the delivery suite. Thus, they can at least anticipate that you want one. She said there's a 90% chance of getting one. I was registered to deliver at United Christian Hospital but maybe this advice is relevant to QEH too.

In the end, I had an emergency c-sec and didn't need one. But for my first child, I had an induced vaginal delivery, and I made the mistake of telling them I would decide later when I was offered an epidural and ended up not getting one when I did want it (within the medically prescribed time frame). So if you're offered an epidural and you are having a vaginal delivery, just take it, because you may not get it later if you change your mind. But basically, don't wait for them to offer...just ask. I think they gave me the painkiller shot that Karhu mentioned but it didn't seem to help.

Also try to practice deep breathing, maybe while pinching yourself. They provide gas which definitely helps the pain IF you can manage to not panic and breathe through the contractions.

I must be the only one that actually liked the hospital food. But I agree that you might need snacks to supplement. They tend to do rounds with milk and fruit but when I was there, the fruit was orange... not very filling.