Cutie and the ‘gina

I have an amazing client who after all three of her babies l have become really close with. We spend a lot of time making each other laugh, once we even came up with every possible name for breasts. She gets really big ones after baby you see - they deserve a name.

Her first baby was an efficient primip birth, then the second was born just as I walked through the door of the birthcentre. So with baby number three the plan was to stay home and avoid a baby in the car.

The other kids are now three and two, gorgeous little farmers who are full noise and into everything. I love hearing about their shenanigans. It makes me appreciate my teenagers. A couple of days before baby number three arrived they had helpfully filled the dishwasher with buckets of sand 🤣.

So my morning phonecall at the very respectable hour of 8am to tell me she was in labour was met with some excitement - I’d been looking forward to this! She reckoned she wasn’t ready for me to come yet though. Hmmm that didn’t feel right. I really didn’t want to miss this. So I got dressed, made brekkie and instead of keeping pacing, decided I would drive to the closest town to her, buy a coffee and wait somewhere a bit closer to relieve my anxiety. Then when she phoned and it was all go I would be close enough and could still catch a baby.

Just as I was getting into the car her man rung, telling me that although she didn’t agree he reckoned it was time. He really DIDN’T want to catch a baby 😉. So with the two of us on the same page it was foot to the floor to get there. As I pulled into the driveway he and the kids were waiting to open the gate. I figured if he was outside then she was still in one piece. Whew.

The three year old took my hand to help me find his mum. Then he said something priceless:

“The baby is hurting mummy’s tummy. Then it’s gonna pop out mummy’s ‘gina, but I’ll put my earmuffs on”.

Sure enough the earmuffs were clasped in his other hand. By the time I got to the bedroom I was laughing so hard at baby just ‘popping out mums ‘gina’ that I wasn’t much use for a minute. Especially when I saw his little bro also had his earmuffs at the ready.

Within half an hour she had her baby whilst kneeling beside the queen bed that had her two little boys sitting up on the pillows, wearing their protective eargear and eating snakes. We women all had a lot of laughs, dad had tears in his eyes, the boys did some pointing and the new arrival cleared his lungs.

It was just wonderful.

So after that awesome morning I had to then drive an hour north to the hospital to drop off her and the baby’s bloods. The closest Pathlab is half an hour away from where she birthed, but on the weekend we have no services at all. In order to find out if a Rhesus Negative woman needs anti-D after birth I have to know the baby’s blood type, so the samples had to be dropped up at the hospital. At least it was daytime and after that I could head back home in time for afternoon tea. I could also use the opportunity to visit my client who had a cesarean the day before, to see how she was getting on.

While I was in the hospital room with that client the phone rang, I left the room to hear a first time mum of my backup’s breathing through a very nasty contraction. I finished up in a hurry at the hospital and then drove south again to assess this woman at her home - to determine whether it was time for her to come all the way back to the hospital to have her baby. It was. I felt a bit like a yo-yo.

So 22 hours after I first left home for the homebirth I finally made it back again on Sunday mornjng at 5am. After way too much hospital toast and crappy coffee. But that poor client of my backup’s still hadn’t had her baby. I had finally handed over to someone else when I stopped making any sense.

I had been in bed for three hours of dribbling style sleep when my phone rang again and another one of my backups clients told me she hadn’t felt her baby move for a little while - she was crying. I said of course I would come and meet her straight away.

Then I put the phone down and had a little cry myself. I was exhausted. There was nothing left in the tank. Zilch. Nada. But I had already called our locum to go and be with the other lady in labour, so I was out of options. As it was the weekend my back up was off. To do an emergency call out for something like a reduced movements monitoring there is no payment attached (should have been a plumber). So no one else was going to get out of bed at dawn on a Sunday morning and do it for me. Believe me I had run through all the possibilities in my head!

My husband was woken by me having that little sob feeling sorry for myself and offered to drive me. Oh thank god! I don’t think I would’ve been safe to drive at all, so he chauffeured me (also unpaid 😉) to do the monitoring, luckily her baby was fine and she was reassured.

Then I needed to see my homebirth client as baby was now 24 hours old, so my generous chauffeur and I drove off into the sticks. I’d then had to explain why I was dropped off by my chauffeur for that visit (oh and the teenage daughter who used the opportunity to have a driving lesson🙄). So they knew how long I had been working. Of course it was lovely to see them, especially lovely that the three-year-old can’t say my name properly and calls me ‘cutie’. I’ll take that! Especially looking like I did that day!

That wee man has been busy telling everybody not about the baby, but about the blood coming out of mummy’s ’gina. He thinks that’s pretty neat. I must admit I’ve never waited for a placenta whilst sitting on the floor, paused between mums legs, with a toddler on my knee and coffee in hand, having a lot of matter-of-fact discussion about what was going on. The ear muffs were gone by then you see.

When I turned up to see her again on day 2 she then presented me with a home-made lasagne that she’d just whipped up. Omg the guilt! (I leapt straight to her getting mastitis in my head as she wasn’t resting enough). This woman had just pushed (sorry ‘popped’) her third baby out - at home like a rockstar - and had then managed to fit in making me dinner amongst all that parenting. I almost cried again. What a sweetheart.

Hubby also had time that visit for a coffee, so we all sat around having a yarn about how wonderful they found having baby born at home. Sure enough though, a couple of days later mastitis crept in on those big bazoonkas and she had to deal with that. The toddler explained to me how she managed to recover by copying her technique - ‘getting chips to munch on and climbing into bed because he had sore boobies’.

I will miss this family!