Happy International day of the Midwife - aka superwoman!

The amazing Cass Emmett from capturing life photography has made a slide show that depicts us at work beautifully. It was awesome to see my colleagues and I with our grins on. There is nothing better than helping lift a baby up to their mama for the first time 💕. The relationship that is formed between a midwife and her client just glows out of these pictures.

This is the link: https://vimeo.com/545226139

Midwives have existed for longer than we can think back. Possibly the second oldest profession 😉. Yet the work that these highly skilled and empathetic women do is often under appreciated and under valued. It’s like we operate in the background, undercover warriors doing one of the most important jobs possible.

Why is that?

Is it because we are the only role that is (mostly) women working with women? Is it because instead of striking we all couldn’t bring ourselves to tell our clients there would be no one they knew to support them at their birth? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for striking for fair pay. But our births can’t be rescheduled, agency staff can’t be arranged to cover us - there just aren’t any. And anyway we are ‘self employed’ - albeit contracted to the government so we can’t set our own fees.

It’s a conundrum, how to keep New Zealand’s amazing continuity of care system so the bond and trust you can see in Cassie’s photos continues to ensure New Zealand women feel empowered and in control of their births. For me personally fair pay would solve the conundrum, it would mean I would stay in the game longer, I could have more time off call. Or afford to pay a locum to take my clinic when I’ve been up all night. Or pay for a taxi home when I’m too exhausted to drive at 5am. All things that would decrease the mental load and help us recover to give everything we have to our next client.

I don’t want to change our system, I feel it works for the woman beautifully and I like being my own boss. It just needs some better support so we don’t all keep burning out and retiring. The average length of a midwife working in the community is seven years. I’m now doing overtime and I’d like to continue!

I’d like to continue doing the random days like I had last week. I was trucking along in a small rural town getting through my list of postnatal client visits when my husband rang. He was on the day shift as a paramedic.

Did I have a client due to birth on Beechwood street? Because they had been called there and their code said the 111 caller could see the baby’s head. Trouble is he was 40 minutes away as all the local ambulances were elsewhere.

No I didn’t. And a quick ring around to some local midwives said they didn’t either. My next visit was on the same street as this poor woman. So much went through my head. Do I just randomly knock on the door? Now that would be stupid I know. But there’s a woman in there that I have all the skills and equipment to help. I was so torn. But she wasn’t registered to me, I haven’t been asked to go to her instead by her actual midwife. I needed to find out who that midwife was fast! Could my man phone the house and ask?

Apparently not. He has to go through clinical desk and reads his instructions from an iPad. And those instructions also said there is an ‘alert’ on the house. Which means it’s unsafe to visit without support.

So that really rules out me turning up. But what if she’s bleeding? Tick tock...

Meanwhile my midwifery network is working behind the scenes on Messenger figuring out whose client she is. With nothing else to do but wait I visit my postnatal client and drive past the house on the way. It didn’t look dodgy - but hey there must be an alert for a reason? I did my visit a little preoccupied and feeling like I should be elsewhere for sure.

Then 20 minutes later my husband rang. He was there, could see no reason for the alert and had permission for me to attend from the woman. At the same time my colleagues had found out who the midwife was. So I called her and high tailed it out of there back to the birthing woman.

Her midwife had assumed the ambulance would arrive before she could arrange someone else to attend, as she was already at a birth. Normally this would be the case, but this time they were three towns away.

When I flew in hubby and his sidekick had it all under control really. The woman was holding her baby in the bath, baby had arrived about 30 minutes earlier - probably as I was first driving past. The only major concern was that they were both cold. Babies lose heat if they aren’t dried very quickly and it can be life threatening. The plug had been let out of the bath and the house was cold. Now a woman will raise her own temperature to warm the baby if they are skin to skin, but it’s pretty difficult in those circumstances. She was also in shock, with baby arriving after only five contractions and hadn’t been able to manage getting out of the bath.

There was no blood loss at all, which is a little worrying - was it all pooling behind the placenta? It’s hard when you know nothing about the woman - what was normal for her? So I talked the sidekick through giving oxytocin, clamped and cut the cord, then as the woman pushed, I pulled on the cord and the placenta came easily. Still no blood loss, whew.

Then it was into warming mode. Hubby had the heater blaring in the ambulance as well as towels warming on the dash. There were none left in the house, so we moved to the ambulance pretty fast. I have spare baby merino’s in my car for just such an eventuality, so I wrapped baby in those and quickly got her skin to skin and feeding in the ambulance and waved them all off - after a quick hug for the woman and my hubby 😊.

Whole process took around 25 minutes.

Wow wasn’t expecting that.

So then I just carried on with my only slightly postponed visits. With a secret smile on my face.

I didn’t have anything to tweak on hubby’s care. They would have done a great job - just a bit slower than me. It’s nice to be able to help him out for a change! He reckons he appreciated my presence just incase it all turned to custard. He did also get the alert removed from the address, so in future care won’t be slowed down.

I did however have a laugh at their lack of preparedness for the messyness. All I grabbed from my car was my instruments to birth the placenta, assuming they would have everything else. But when I asked for gloves he replied they didn’t have any more (the ambulance was a long walk away) except that he had ‘double gloved’. “Right give me one of those then”, I bossed, so he whipped his top set off and I put those on. Haven’t had to do that before, needs must and all that. Then they had no incos. These are absorbent small sheets that midwives go through ten a penny of. So with no towels either, cleaning up and relocating the woman was tricky.

Now basically you actually need no equipment for a baby that just falls out, but for future reference hubby you need to grab a BOX of gloves, the incos and as many towels as you can carry. Then I won’t make you run back and forward to the truck like my lil minion 🤣.

So that’s NZ midwifery. We help. We’re there. We know our colleagues. We’re a network.

And as a result that woman didn’t stay alone and eventually she felt safe.

Happy International Day of the Midwife my friends! And thanks to my past clients who have sent me messages. You all rock!