First Delivery!

O I just got off 24-hour call, from 7:00am Sunday to 7:00am Monday. It was very eventful: I scrubbed in to four vaginal deliveries and two C-sections. And I delivered my first baby! And guess what his name was? I can't tell you because that would be breaking the law, but it may have been remotely related to one of my favorite people, and that made me really happy. Plus, the couple was really wonderful: the wife was beautiful, and was working really hard and keeping a great attitude the entire time. And the husband was kind and supportive, and when I handed him his child, he started to sniffle (hiding it as best as he could, which was not at all) and hadn't stopped sniffling when I left the room. They were young, and this was their first baby.

Positives and negatives: I also got shoved away (literally, my hand was boxed out of the field) from an earlier delivery, which was just although a little harsh. It was one of the interns' patients, and the intern had come on her day off between rotations to deliver the patient. I'd seen the patient before, and was just trying to do what our clerkship director told us to do by holding a sterile towel to the perineum. I'm constantly trying to find the "aggressive" that's looked upon as praiseworthy in surgical subspecialties; one one side is true getting in the way or overstepping what we're allowed to do, and on the other side is not getting experiences and looking uninterested or lazy. I guess my upper-level answered that question for me this time: get out of the way, this is the intern's delivery!

I was also in on a delivery where the mother had chorioamnionitis. The mom's body was palpably hot. The baby also had other complications like meconium staining and late decelerations. But her delivery was remarkable for a really supportive family.

The last delivery I was in on last night almost moved me to tears. The mother had been laboring for days in the inactive latent phase. Suddenly, she went from 3 centimeters dilated to completely dilated, and her pushing was extremely effective. She pushed seven times, and her baby was born! She played soft country music from her iPad during her pushing, and she turned the TV off. She had one female friend with her (a friend, not a doula, but serving pretty much the same purpose). What was most remarkable was how strong and clear her emotions were about the delivery: her love for that baby struck me with awe. When the baby was born and I placed it on her chest, her expression and her quiet almost-sobbing words of love made me tear up. And then, when the baby needed a little resuscitation a few minutes later because of some complications (baby is fine now), she was anguished. She controlled her anxiety, but just barely! And she spoke to her baby across the room (where the NICU team had him under a warmer with a respirator) by name, calling out softly and encouraging him to cry. And finally, when she got to hold him again, I could see that the entire world was turned off for her, and there was only she and her son. She wanted and needed nothing else. It made me think of God's attitude toward us, and it filled me with hope and joy and admiration, both for this woman and for God who created her and who created us, and who aches for and loves us each even more desperately than this.