Locum’s loved-up lockdown baby joins line-up for services
Shub Nanda, 29, didn’t expect to get pregnant during lockdown.
“We’d been thinking about getting pregnant but hadn’t actively started trying, then all of a sudden it was very serious, like, okay, we are having a baby.”
After coming back from a Europe trip with her husband in January, Nanda started work as a locum optometrist and had been travelling around the country.
When lockdown happened she had to return to Auckland and couldn’t work under level 4 and 3 restrictions. “If it hadn’t been for lockdown, we probably wouldn’t have had all that time together and I probably wouldn’t have got pregnant when I did.”
She and her husband, Radae Prabhakar, were thrilled to welcome their baby girl, Thea, into the world on January 17, a week after her due birth date.
But getting maternity care through the public system was difficult.
“We came across a few areas where we felt that the lockdown babies had really put the pressure on the maternity services like booking an ultrasound scan and getting an Anti-D injection,” she said.
Some women with negative blood types may need an antibody known as Anti-D immunoglobulin when they are about 36 weeks’ pregnant to help safeguard the baby.
The Papakura mum said they made the decision to go privately because she wasn’t able to get the Anti-D injection through the public system.
“Getting an obstetrician privately was the next hurdle because they were just so so booked out until, like, April.
“If the private system is fully booked, I can’t even imagine what the public system must be like,” Nanda said.
She said it was only because she had a contact within the obstetrics community that she was able to get in.
“Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to and I think that’s just because so many people are having babies at the moment.”