by Joceline
Delivered that sweet baby today–well, in truth, my attending held my hands and moved them around for me. And, you can pull hard on a baby’s head. While I love babies and thoroughly enjoyed my week on Newborn Nursery, I’m still a little terrified that they’ll explode if I handle them too vigorously (it’s that giant head, I’m afraid it’ll flop off and crush their little neck). But seriously. More force than I would have expected.
Also more…well, let’s put it this way, next time I will wear a face mask. And shoe covers. This is only the second delivery I’ve seen, but the equipment is really cool–the bottom half of the bed flips off and then it’s essentially a table that holds your legs for you, with a bucket at the end.
Also some people like to call babies little alien parasites, but do you know what really does look like alien paraphernalia? Umbilical cords. They’re all white and intestine-y and gel-like, with a giant pulsating vein. COOL.
Anyway, the whole thing was AWESOME and went extremely smoothly, taking about ten minutes. Well, let me amend that. It was about ten minutes from when we walked in and the mother started pushing, to the end of it. Which got me thinking. She had been having sporadic contractions for probably a few days, and actively laboring for at least hours. We were there for the exciting flurry of pushing and pulling and gushing (and wiping), and then we left her to enjoy her baby while we finished up charts and filled orders and went on to see other patients.
It’s just so weird to me. My life is intersects at such pivotal points in other people’s lives–babies being born, people getting sick and maybe getting better, or maybe not and having to get major treatments or even dying. That next work day for me is someone’s birthday, or big surgery day, or something. Not to get all depressing when I was just talking about babies, but once we ended up putting someone on dialysis, for the rest of their life. We put in the order and that was that–they got wheeled down to dialysis and now they have to go to the kidney center, three times a week for three hours, every week until they die. To me that was just another day on Gen Med, but to them it’s “that summer where I had stomach pain and had to go the ER, and had to stay four days in the hospital, and that’s when I went on dialysis”.
I guess, now and when I actually start working, I don’t want to forget that all the stuff that’s part of my workday could be a major event for someone else. I can see how, when it’s the thousandth baby you’ve delivered, it becomes another routine thing. Luckily right now everything is exciting because it’s new and I generally have more excitement about things than is necessary.
Although, I think delivering a baby will always be cool because I don’t think I’m going into OB-Gyn, so it won’t be routine, and also, BABIES coming out of someone, how terrifying cool is that?? Also, here is my pledge, I will pick the epidural, because modern medicine is a great thing. And so is not tearing your vagina. Words to live by.
