midwife's muse

The gas man cometh

Ohh Lordy. I've never seen anything like that. What happened to it?

Hopefully, they can repair it. He's here now with an array of electrical components. Fingers crossed.

All our furniture is being moved back into the house today. It's being living in a container on the drive until now, it's getting really exciting.

The weekend was a working one, and boy did we work, everyone is having their babies at the moment. I was first on-call on Saturday and so went into work with a certain degree of trepidation, and I was right to be cautious. I had just filled my diary up with visits to do when the office phone rang, it was Labour Ward saying they were short-staffed and frantic so I was required to work down there until things had calmed down, and then go out and do my work on community. I reappaised my work, put off a booking until Sunday, another midwife picked up two of my visits, but I was still left with 4 visits, two stretch and sweeps and a booking. Off I went onto Labour Ward and started looking after a lady having her third baby. She was coping really well with just gas and air, leaning against the bed. Examined her and found that her cervix was 7cms dilated. Baby's head was slightly high and slightly tilted, her waters hadn't gone yet. I left her waters intact, reasoning that if baby still needed to turn slightly to get it's head down it is easier with the bag of waters providing more moving space. After two hours there was a slight trickle of waters, I was surprised that she still didn't feel like pushing, she was getting fed-up and so I examined her again. There was still a small lip of cervix, baby's head was still quite high, and I could feel the bag of waters. When I reported what I had found she asked that I break her waters, which I did. Thank heavens I had then opened my delivery pack because she started pushing and when I looked I could see the top of baby's head. I asked her partner to push the call button for a second midwife to attend and the woman asked' What's wrong?'. 'Baby's nearly here', I replied. She didn't believe me! When baby has his head out I could see what the problem had been, he had his hand and forearm up behind his head which would have made it difficult for his head to descend. Out came a lovely baby boy. Her other babes had weighed six and a half pounds, little Ross entered the world weighing 9lbs 2ozs, what a difference.

I eventually left the unit at 2.15pm to start my proper job. I finished at 7pm. Of course Saturday impacted on Sunday so I didn't finish until 6.30pm yesteday. I accept no breaks and late finishing as part of my job, but if the staff on Labour Ward had just said 'Thanks for the help' I would have finished the weekend in a much better frame of mind.

26.9.05 12:09