Is this normal? Birthing in Japan...
Hi, I'm a 39 y/o first time soon-to-be momma. I'm American and have been living in Japan for several years now (not military).
Now y'all know Japan doesn't have a lot of overweight folks, and so I expected some inexperience among medical staff. I purposely planned my pregnancy at a private hospital with a NICU, can do emergency C-sections, etc (this is not the default in Japan). I have a ton of family members, sister, mom, cousins galore who gave birth at the 250~300+ pound range without much of any issues at all.
For context on how I'm built, I'm big on my butt, thighs and boobs, but actually pretty light on the belly area. My belly never sagged over my crotch, I never had to pull my belly up for a sonogram, etc.
Somethings that happened to me in Japan that I never heard my other obese family members complain about was:
it was really hard to see the baby on a sonogram. Even with several different sonographers trying. I didn't find out until 36 weeks that I'm having a boy because my fat apparently made it too hard to see the baby. And even then, the head sonographer told me they're about 80% sure. The baby has only looked like an alien on sonograms btw, never got a clear picture of them...
finding a heartbeat has always been hard and they point to obesity as the reason. They always have to bring in the top midwife to find it, because the others can never find it.
I don't know how I'll be able to do natural birth due to this heartbeat finding issue. Today I'm 38 weeks and did NST testing and they had a midwife hold the device in place for 40 minutes (this poor girl) because it was hard to find the heart beat. Despite his beat sounding strong and steady, in the end, it was worthless data because there were 3 big gaps where the head midwife had to come in and find the heart beat again. How tf am I supposed to labor with this device on if it struggles to consistently read my son's heartbeat when I'm relaxed and reclined lol?
Is this normal? I feel like none of my fat fam ever complained about these issues in the US. My main concern is that I'd like to labor naturally and not being able to monitor him well is freaking me out. I'm at peace with doing surgery if I have to, but even the docs at this fancy hospital seem cautious about doing a C-section on a fat girl like me. I live in Tokyo, not the boonies...2 weeks to go and I'm a ball of nerves.