So vaginal birth is preferred in most women because it's really as nature intended it. Nature made women to have babies.

I think that with a c section, a lot of times our moms are are hurting because a c section is major surgery, especially if you're trying to breastfeed.

Sometimes you just don't feel up to it. With a vaginal delivery, our moms are breastfeeding, they're up, walking, taking care of their baby, and performing their normal functions.

Our ultimate goal is to have a healthy mom and a healthy baby, however that delivery should occur. But there are some things that mom can do to help prepare her body for a vaginal delivery and help avoid c section.

Spending babies is a technique which involves looking at what stages the position the babies are in and using some techniques where we turn moms in certain positions which help to facilitate opening up the pelvis so babies can take full advantage of the maternal pelvis at each stage of labor.

Spending babies gives us some techniques to help mamas achieve more balance within their body, and that balance really just helps things fit together to fit through the birth canal.

And then just gravity, if you think about just the basic physiologic effects of that, and that gravity helps baby descend into the birth canal and ultimately for delivery. We have seen that it works, and we have seen a significant reduction in our c section rates since implementing the spinning babies program.

Women's health is a very special topic. Classically, women think that they have to go to an OBGYN for their women's health appointments, and that is perfectly reasonable. However, a lot of people don't know you can go to your primary care provider if they're a family medicine physician, and a lot of them will offer women's health. That's the way that I got into it and found my passion for it. Women's health appointments can be kind of what you make of them. They can contain lots of different things, or they can be very simple and straightforward.

For women who are twenty one through the ages of typically sixty five, they can have things like a Pap smear, which is your routine screening for cervical cancer. But for any other women, even with their Pap smear, we can talk about birth control. We can talk about symptoms that you're having related to, you know, abdominal pain or anything discharge, sexual intercourse, things such as diet, exercise, hormonal changes. That is all part of your overall well-being, and women's health can play a huge factor into that.

I actually got into women's health because a lot of women, in the rural area that I did my residency didn't realize that they could go to a family medicine physician for that care. They thought they had to have a separate appointment. And when you live in a rural area, it's really hard to to find those appointments, and it's really hard to access that care. But if you can get all of your care in one place with your primary care provider, such as a family physician, it makes it a lot more convenient to get all of your care in one place.

Here at Baptist Health Richmond on the mother and baby care, unit, we provide a multitude of services for our expectant moms. Our team includes physicians and nurses that have prepared to provide services such as prenatal planning, breastfeeding support, and we offer support for postpartum depression. And we work together with their obstetrician and our behavioral support team to make sure that they feel supported when they go home and to know that some of what they experience is normal and will provide support for treatment if needed once they have delivered baby.

Our department has several nurses that have achieved a lactation counselor certification, and they are here to provide support to the mom after delivery to make her journey as a breastfeeding mom successful and support them. Even once they go home, we are here to support them. They can come back in for a visit. Martie, one of our lead counselors here, offers that. And so she weighs the baby to make sure that mom is getting enough nutrition for her infant. It is important that we offer these services here at Baptist Health Richmond so we can have those important conversation when mom is wanting to get pregnant through her prenatal care and ensuring a safe delivery and a transition home that is good for her and baby.

Here at Baptist Health Paducah, we are proud to now have the region's first obstetrical emergency department. This means we're expecting patients we are able to provide twenty four seven access to a board certified obstetrician should they need it immediately.

There's always a board certified obstetrician gynecologist here in house to support patients' doctors.

So whether it be emergent care and preventing any kind of delay in that emergent care or being able to support the clinicians in complicated cases and being that skillful second set of hands to help them. That's really what we're here for, to help the clinicians provide care without delay, especially emergencies and patients not having to have any delay in care. You know, emergencies happen on weekends at two in the morning. And by having a physician in house, there isn't a delay in emergency care. We can see the patient immediately, assess the patient, coordinate with their clinician, and get get them in.

And ultimately, what it does is improve care for moms and babies.

Having an obstetrician here twenty four seven on the floor in the hospital is a wonderful and beneficial factor. It gives our patients extreme amount of ease and calm.

Peripheral vascular disease is where you develop plaque primarily in the arteries in the leg, and then it decreases the blood flow to the leg or to the foot. An aortic aneurysm is where the aorta, the main artery that leaves the heart, gets dilated and enlarges.

Mister Spraggs discovered that he had an aneurysm on a CT scan that was done for unrelated reason. We reviewed his prior scans and discovered that it had became much larger.

He took a paper out and drawed on it of what needed to be done, which I thought was great because it eased me down some. But I knew that it had to be done because an aneurysm is not something you play around with.

And then we were able to perform an endovascular aneurysm repair through a very small incision in the groin, and we're able to cover and exclude that enlarged artery from the circulation. He did very well and went home the next day.

Once we got it done, I'm relieved. I feel like I've got a new lease on life.

There's a lot of vascular disease in this region and the area surrounding Paducah, and I think Baptist does a great job of keeping the patient at the center and providing very efficient, great care for the patient with good outcomes.

I thought everybody were great. I mean, they I was nervous, of course, and, everybody treated me really nice. It was quite the experience.

Baptist Health has created a combined ER and Urgent Care model, where we offer, emergency department and urgent care services to any patient that comes in our facility, and based on the services that you receive, we can bill you for urgent care or emergency department.

If you come into our freestanding ER urgent care and you have a condition that you want checked out, I oftentimes will give the patient the decision themselves. Well, we could make this an emergency department visit and really dive into this with some blood work, imaging, which could include CAT scan or ultrasound, or we can do an urgent care visit, which would just be an x-ray, and we can come to a diagnosis that's most likely, and we can treat you based on that. So you actually have the decision of, do I want to take this visit to the next level and make it an emergency care visit, or just wanna get this simple thing taken care of and let's keep it as an urgent care visit?

Since we're part of the Baptist Health System, if you were to come in needing a higher level of care, we can quickly transfer you to one of our hospitals.

If you have a a medical condition that requires an overnight stay at the hospital, you need to be admitted, we are able to provide those services for you. And then you will be transported from our facility directly to your inpatient room. You do not have to go to a second emergency department. You go right upstairs to your admitted room.

Someone would need a pacemaker usually because their heart rate is too slow. It can be because they have trouble generating heartbeats, or they may have a problem with conducting the heartbeats. Traditionally, a pacemaker was always kind of a battery and computer that were placed on the chest wall under the skin, and then leads were ran down to the heart, and that's how it connected with the heart and monitored the heartbeat, and if needed, gave pacing therapy. But things have changed over the last few years.

We now have new types of pacemakers that we're doing, leadless pacemakers, where the pacemaker itself is a wireless device placed directly into the heart tissue. We've known for a long time that wires and leads are probably the weakest part of the pacemaker. Eliminating that gives a very highly reliable pacing system and just removes a point of failure. It also is a very efficient way of pacing, so the the battery life is very good over a decade, if not up to fifteen years.

Patients really love Lila's pacemakers. They like the fact that there's no evidence that they have a pacemaker. The cosmetic appearance of the device is is very nice, you know, and it it allows them to really go on with their life. Many times in clinic, patients come for follow-up and they tell me, doc, I I actually completely forgot that I had this. I'm just living my life, and they really enjoy that part of the device.