I delivered a baby!
Tonight was the first time that I actually got my hands dirty by going through the whole process of helping a woman push her baby out from start to finish. As in, this time I wasn't just watching, I was actually doing the delivery.
Turned out, my first deliver was of a baby girl named Gayathri; born at 10:26 pm [the same time I was!]. She was gorgeous with long tufts of black curly hair. And the parents were so cute and happy and very thankful at the end.
Couple of things:
[1] I just love being around Indian people and Indian families. There is just so much warmth and love in the room that eminates from a shared history, a common culture.
[2] The experience of having a family and having a child is so incredibly powerful and beautiful and I never quite appreciated the extent of either facet at all. In fact, growing up, I always considered familial and filial duties in life to be rather onerous and boring; but I think my perspective may start changing. The hope is that I don't get so consumed in my aspiration to be a brilliant doctor that I forget to live life to its fullest; to experience all that there is to experience; to love and be loved.
[3] I forgot to put shoe covers on and ended up getting bloody goop all over my super-expensive European Hotters. I truly don't mind. I'm much less bothered by it than I thought I would be. The only issue is that other maternity patients are visibly disturbed when they see me walking down the hall with blood all over my shoe. They have no idea that what they are soon going to go thru is a really bloody messy process.
posted by Tej @ 10:29 PM
1 Comments:
YAY!!!!!
Night float is the best time...most babies seem to be born at night...I'm sure due to some hormonal fluctuations that I don't recall...cortisol, perhaps?
How did you feel while you were doing it? (Not after, but during?)
And the cosmic link of the same birth time...you now share a lot with this child. You were the first to hold her outside of the womb, with these happy coincidences of culture and timing. Not to sound too mystical...
There is a little girl in North Carolina that was born at 26 weeks, very small, who is now 2 and thriving. I had less in common, but that connection was there, not only with the child, but with her parents. I still tease her dad that I held her first (of course, I subsequently intubated her and gave her surfactant, so he kinda prefers it that way). We were able to have wonderfully open conversations, including the one in which he asked me, in some embarassment (but only some), why is daughter did not have nipples, if it were some sort of birth defect from being so early. They're there, just incompletely developed then tissue-wise, and not pigmented at all, so I showed him. And then we laughed.
Wait, totally just hijacked. Sorry. I do like the nipple story.
Delivering someone's baby is such a beautiful experience. It's fabulous that we all get to do this, even if we don't do ob. But wear the shoe covers! Or invest in some Crocs or other supportive shoes you can hose off (I guess not Crocs--they have holes for ventilation. Not on the socks...ughh). If not for you, for the patients. The pushing mommies and the expectant daddies have absolutely no idea how brutal the process is, what a profusion of gore and fluid and barbarism and primal nature.
And amazingly, they don't remember after their child is born, either. I mean 3 days after. When doing a newborn exam, one must check the hips, by the Barlow and Ortoloni exams, and check the Moro startle reflex. They don't look especially gentle...they are not remotely harmful things, but they involving moving a warm snuggly babe in nasty cold air into positions they don't want, to make sure their hips don't slide out of socket. Problem, that. Interferes with walking. Easily corrected if caught early. Anyhow, so many mothers gasp when seeing this part of the exam, and when re-assured that their babe is angry, not in pain, say that it just looks so "rough" and the baby is "so delicate." I generally remind them, gently, that this child just shoved its way violently and inexorably into the world, and there was not a thing gentle about that. They really don't break. One must take care, yes.
Woo-hoo, Tej delivered a ba-bee!!!
Awesome. You always remember your firsts.
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