two sides of the miracle of birth

Tuesday August 11

the nurse mid-wife i was shadowing today offered to allow me to assist in two births.
i watched her coach the patients for the most part, but then after the baby began crowning, she showed me how to apply anterior and posterior pressure to the tiny, fragile, jelly-like cranium of the baby to minimize trauma to the mother's vaginal canal.
after the first one, i was having a lot of trouble trying to blink back the tears of joy, astonishment, my body quivering in its attempt to physiologically scream Hallelujah. it was a difficult birth and the mother was torn up quite extensively and would need hours of stitching up afterwards. but to feel the head finally pass through, and then the rest of the body follow quicker than a blink of an eye, and then all of a sudden you have this steaming mass of human in your hands...
the first one came out with the cord around his neck, and immediately the room was swarming with Peds docs with baby gas masks and various suction devises to get air into this little blue body, which by the minute was turning pink and robust. there was tension in the air like a thunderstorm, but it thankfully passed.
the second birth was almost too easy - not nearly as much blood or pain. the tiny girl came out purple and crying. i wasn't so apt to begin crying this time around but was still wide-eyed with the gravity of what exactly i was doing. i still can't wrap my head around it now.



Wednesday August 12

scrubbed in to a repeat C-section today. got the low down on sterile technique in the OR. and also got an eyeful of the horrors of cutting through a woman's midsection to extract her baby. this lady had tons of adhesions from her last procedure, so there was a big use of the cautery tool. i was put on suction and retractor duty. it felt horrible to be pulling her flesh in ways it was never meant to be pulled, and i suppose it is a testament to the resiliency of the human body that you can pretty much rip through the fascia like it was the first day of anatomy and the patient will still be okay in the end. the smell of burning human i could take, the massive quantities of spurting blood i was fine with, the cutting and scissoring was okay -- but when the attending took her hand and shoved it up in into the abdominal cavity, the sound of ripping fascia was just too much. we treated our cadavers this way, for crying out loud. didn't help that this woman was half-consciously struggling with discomfort despite the anesthesia.
the baby was delivered and almost immediately began heartily crying. there was still joy and relief in the OR. however, something just wasn't the same. plus, they ultimately had to put the mom under general anesthesia so they could begin the long, long....long process of putting her back together again.