more details about having a baby in Mexico

The last blog was more just an announcement about our new baby girl. Before I moved here and even more so after I got pregnant I got extremely curious as to what it would be like to have a baby here. First I asked some of my husbands family but they didn't have a lot of input for me, they had all been through the public health system to have their babies and saw noting wrong with laboring in a room with 5 other women and no support person at your side. I knew that the private sector would be different but I wasn't sure how different from Mexicos public, or from the states. Iv written before about my doctor appointments but let me just say again we ended up with a great Doctor and I have no way of recommending how to find one. We drove around town looking for an office that looked decent and had good parking, seriously that's what we did. We made our first appointment and had decided if we didn't like him we would keep looking. He ended up impressing us so we stuck with him. In our town there is no phone book or list of doctors at the hospitals. The drive around method is used for everything, or you can ask but his family just kept telling us to go to the public facility and we didn't know anyone else at the time.
A few things are different even if using the private system, and I need to say this is in the area of Mexico I live in I cant speak for anywhere else. I think I mentioned this before but I'm so amazed by it Ill mention it again. Our doctor and/or a nurse was by my side the enitre time until after I was back in my room after the baby was born. Im sure this has to do with the fact that I didn't have a million monitors on me that would have alarmed for the staff to know if something was wrong. But it was nice and I felt well taken care of. Now for months before the baby I kept asking my doctor if I would receive pain meds after the baby. With my first they gave me percocet and I still remember how much the cramps hurt when I first nursed her and how bad the stitches felt. He kept reassuring me yes he would give me pain meds. He wrote for me to have what they call Tylex. Its Tylenol 750mg. Yikes that's not pain meds, but I bit the bullet and took it, I actually think this has a lot to do with how quickly I healed. My hospital room had an extra bed in it for Issac to sleep in which ended up being more comfy than my hospital bed. :) The hospital beds where the old electric brown ones that first came out after the crank beds. I almost bet they were donated from a hospital in the states when they up graded. Again Ill say there where no IV pumps so the nurses kept having to calculate the drip rate of my IV. Oh I got fancy slippers that Im still wearing around the house not those crapy socks the hospitals give out in the states. I think I mentioned before but Im not sure that my 1 week appointment with my OB was free. This is also amazing to me. A big difference was the 1 week appointment I don't remember seeing my OB that soon after the baby but I do remember going to the pediatrician like every week for a bit. Here they don't want to see the baby until 1months. I do think that now for regular doctor visits we are going to seek the public health system, as long as there are no hospitalizations involved. Being a nurse I feel I can disregard or listen to what I know is best from an office visit and I dont plan to go to the doctor for a common infection because you can get just about any medication over the counter hear. Oh something else I found out lately is that the shot records for children are pretty similar except for a few months, and the only big difference is that they all get their tetanus shot at 2yrs old. I think this is because they are expected to start Kindergarden at 3yrs. This is another reason we need to get the girls into the public health system.