Dr Pagette was my doctor for my first pregnancy. I was referred to her by a relative. I liked that she was older and had experience and confidence. She didn't have the most advanced technology (no 3D ultrasounds for example) or online appointments or portal, but what mattered more to my husband and me was her skill and compassion and trying her best to understand and support our wishes as safely as possible.
As a healthy pregnancy woman without complications, I can say that all in all the appointments went fine and it was nice that the office never seemed busy or made me wait long. She was generally chipper and calm during our appointments which was appealing. At the end of the end of the pregnancy when baby didn't come by due date, we felt that our questions about the possibility of waiting for natural labor to begin even just a few days past 40 or 41 weeks were not welcomed by Dr Pagette and that she got a little flustered or uncomfortable about our questions.
From my personal experience, Dr Pagette will accidentally forget some details such as gender of the baby and whether or not you want to know, and we had the general feeling of forgetfulness. Our first results to check if our pregnancy was going well she called and said the baby's levels weren't good and sadly it wouldn't continue--my heart sunk-- and then she said, no wait, she read it upside down and the baby was fine. That was a horrible rollercoaster moment I'll never forget. We just tried to overlook these things since we were first-time parents and already invested financially and otherwise into her as a provider and were still hoping she could meet our overall goals.
From our personal experience with the actual labor and birth she leans heavily towards medical intervention. If your baby isn't in the "right" position, it's not like other birthing positions or labor techniques will be tried unless your doula or nurses help you. While we obviously didn't choose a home birth experience, we were hoping for the most natural experience possible for health benefits of the baby and mom. We wanted a doctor to more actively and supportively help us achieve this goal and to help our baby get into position for vaginal birth than what we experienced with Dr Pagette. We are grateful the unplanned c-section that became necessary by Dr Pagette turned out where baby and mom were healthy in the end. However, the experience left us feeling very mournful over the actual labor experience and how traumatizing it ended up being. What could be prevented/not prevented, what was necessary or not, of course we will never know-- we can only stay positive and grateful we are all alive and physically healthy after a slow c-section recovery. We know Dr Pagette just did the best she could and followed her own instinct and policies the best she could to have what she deemed the safest outcome, which we respect, and her methods may work just fine for some. But the trauma and feeling over the birth experience itself takes time to heal emotionally, for my husband and me.
Later, after switching to a provider that meets our needs excellently, getting our medical records sent to our current doctor was a total nightmare. Although all records were requested, not all were sent, after repeated attempts from my doctors office to theirs. When I visited in person to get the ones not sent to the doctor, they had them already printed but insisted on charging the full amount they can legally charge, $61, for their trouble to print them, even though it was due to their office error. When my husband spoke to Dr Pagette over the phone while I stood there in person in front of her, and rather than showing any signs of caring about the unnecessary inconvenience and stress of just trying to get my own records, she just stated, she's allowed to charge that amount and that's what we'd have to pay to get them in person. I found it surprising that she would rather insist on $61 despite her office's mistakes than show a small courtesy to a patient who had paid thousands to her and to at the minimum apologize for the inconvenience of needing to send the rest of requested files from my record again to my doctor. She actually walked away from me and shut the door behind her.
If you are a patient of hers I certainly hope you receive the best she can offer and that you have an excellent experience, but overall the forgetfulness, the high level of medical intervention, and the extremely disappointing level of reasonableness regarding customer service was a deal-breaker for us. read more