The Anonymous Widower

Advice For Expectant Mothers

There is a widely trailed story today about what expectant mothers should avoid. It’s here on the BBC. This is the main advice.

1. Use fresh organic food rather than processed
2. Avoid food and drink in cans and plastic containers
3. Minimise use of moisturisers, cosmetics, shower gel and fragrances
4. Avoid buying new furniture, fabrics, non-stick frying pans and cars when pregnant or nursing

When C was pregnant with our first child, she was a student in her last year at Liverpool University.  She actually did her exams at nearly seven months pregnant.  She got a II-2, so she couldn’t have done badly.

She didn’t purposedly avoid any chemicals, but as the nice flat we lived in didn’t have a shower, she did at least avoid shower gel, which is on the list of products to avoid. As to the last point, we couldn’t afford new furniture or cars. our frying pan had been borrowed from her mother and was a well-used steel one, complete with a bit of added rust. Did it put iron into the food?

Neither of us smoked, although throughout her pregnancy, she had to endure the Capstan Full Strength cigarettes of her tutor; Robert Kilroy Silk.

But advice was different in those days.  We went to stay with a family in Hingham in Norfolk, where C had been a mother’s help during University holidays.  The mother, who incidentally was the daughter of a doctor, asked if she’d like a brandy before going to bed, as it would make the baby sleep better. She declined, but only because she was pretty abstemious with alcohol.

We also moved south just a week or so before the expected birth date and then in London, she didn’t have a hospital. I told that story in a post called Waiting for Apollo 11. Theses are the links to Part 2 and Part 3 of the story. We didn’t do boring, even in 1969.

We all survived and the only question, that sometimes comes to mind, is was the cancer that killed her caused by all of those smoky tutorials forty years before she died?

I do know that if she was here today, she’d be laughing like a drain!

June 5, 2013 - Posted by AnonW | Health, World | Cancer, Childbirth, Hospitals, Liverpool University