The Aftermath...

So the switch flicked and my multip called soon after posting my last blog. I’d just got home from my clinic day and she rang at the respectable time of mid afternoon. Ready to go as she had a previous fast birth and was a bit concerned about getting caught out at home. On arrival at the birthcentre it turned out we did have time to chill for a while before she established.

Great, another beautiful waterbirth requiring pretty much no effort from me or her man - as she was completely in her own zone. Amazing to watch really.

So after doing some suturing (it’s odd but I really like suturing - watching things come together is cool!) and shovelling down some toast I headed home around 10.30pm. At 11.30pm after catching up with the family and having a much needed shower I turned out the light, plumped the pillows, jammed my earplugs in... had time for about three long breaths and the phone rang.

NOOOOOOO not on five hours sleep and a 14 hr work day already. Please no.

Better than having 30 minutes sleep though - that’s dreadful to wake from. I know this is digging deep for positivity, but it’s all I could come up with at the time!

On talking on the phone to the support crew of the first time mum (who was in her fourth day of pregnancy end symptoms) it sounded like she was now cranking along. Her waters had broken, contractions were every three minutes, lasting for over a minute, and she was YELLING. Loud.

Sometimes after a long latent labour things can then go really fast once it establishes. So instead of having her wait the 40 minutes for me to get to her house we arranged to meet at the birthcentre.

My previous client was still in the birthroom, as the postnatal rooms were all full, she would move into one when someone left the next day. So my plan was to sneak quietly into the birthroom next door so as not to disturb the new parents.

Fail.

Too loud and panicked for that, this poor first time mum was labouring with a baby in the more painful posterior position, with no waters between her and baby for that extra cushioning. She was doing it hard. In her notes I wrote “distressed +++”. In real life I would say she was in agony and losing the plot.

It took all my skills to calm her enough to get her focused on breathing through her contractions. My voice was running a constant roller coaster from warm and empathetic to bossy and demanding and back again. In fact in the woman’s own words she said she wanted to leave and throw herself under a bus 😳. You get the picture.

A vaginal exam tells us cervical dilation. It tells us what’s happened so far - but not how long things will take from here. This rockstar presented as transitional, the staff midwife and I thought she would be pushing at any moment. But her vaginal exam said otherwise. Her cervix was 2cm open. Wow. Wasn’t expecting that.

So that’s a mind f#*%. How do you put a good spin on that? It’s very tempting to lie, but that’s not my bag. Like most midwives I’ve sent women home or kept them at home at this stage. Home is the best place when you aren’t established into labour. But this lady needed so much support for her pain already. She wasn’t going anywhere. Her support crew although awesome couldn’t do that on their own - they loved her too much and weren’t bossy enough!

So then I’m suddenly between a rock and a hard place. I decided to do everything I could to turn this posterior baby, give it a couple of hours and reassess from there. So acupuncture, homeopathy, weird positions and rebozo for almost an hour it was. This particular rebozo move is using a scarf with the woman in a head down bum up position on the bed. You hold it over her bum and hips and jiggle it from side to side. It’s called the bonbon move - like the lolly! Anyway I was hoping that it was doing more than giving my bat wings a work out.

Then as I popped out to the office to update the staff midwife I heard her taking a phonecall, another community midwife had a second time mum and was expecting imminent birth. They were 15 minutes away.

SHIT I was taking up the only birth room with someone who wasn’t officially ‘established’ in their labour. So fast decisions needed to be made. We would move to the education room and from there decide if we would transfer to the base hospital for pain relief or if labour established then hopefully the room would be free again by then.

In hindsight it was a dumb move, I shouldn’t have been nice and I should have kept my room. After a frantic 20 minutes cleaning the first room and getting it ready for the new woman and then trying to turn the education room into a possible birth room the staff midwife and I were sweating. And my client was still yelling. There is nothing worse than when a woman begs you to help them. Especially when all you have to offer are words.

It was a very hard day at the office, a posterior baby, a not coping woman,

Suddenly no shower or pool which is my main pain relief, no back of bed to lean up and over, no Swiss ball even. All I managed to steal was one of those toilet shaped seats with handles that you put in the shower - just a bloody wee seat! I tried to pass it off as a birthing stool but the poor woman’s feet didn’t even reach the ground. The only bonus was that she didn’t realise she was perched on top of black rubbish sacks and stolen shower curtains to protect the carpet.

I even took a pic it was all so ludicrous.

All I had up my sleeve was a bloody bag of fluids for energy, exhausting acupressure tricks and that voice rotating between warm and empathetic to bossy and insistent.

That’s when she mentioned the bus plan.

Watching a woman while you tell them you have given them all the help you can, that she is the only one that can do this, that you won’t leave her side but there is nothing to do now but ride out the waves... it’s hard. You see realisation hit like a sledgehammer. It’s a very very extreme rite of passage birthing a baby.

I could see in her eyes she was giving up. Sometimes this is a good thing, sort of like an epidural it can cause the pelvic floor to relax and the baby to spin into a better position. Although unlike an epidural the pain doesn’t go away! One of her awesome support crew noticed me flagging and kept feeding me pineapple lumps, she told me later she was scared I was going to swap out with another midwife.

Then just like that 3 hours after being only 2cm dilated she was ready to push! At the exact same time as the usurper in my birthing room! Typical. Was it the rebozo and the acupuncture, was it the giving up, was it just going to happen anyway? Birth is a mystery.

Spirits lifted then for sure. So it’s action stations, standing and squatting with each push, leaning on her man, leaning on the bloody wee seat, kneeling on the massage table (yes I tightened the legs), we changed positions often and she worked supremely hard. So did I. Usually you just have to listen to the baby and document in between contractions, now I had to fit in the added issue of fighting to straighten the garbage bags on the floor as well.

Baby got much lower down but couldn’t negotiate turning the corner around her mum’s pubic bone, after 75minutes it became obvious we weren’t getting baby out without a suction cup to help. So after all that hard work we needed to transfer in an ambulance. Gutting. We left around 6 in the morning. Leaving a bomb site in our wake for the poor staff midwife - although I bet she was secretly relieved the carpet was safe!

A couple of hours later a new soul had arrived and that awesome woman became a mother. That solid rock of a man became a father and they both swore they would never have another baby.

I’ve heard that before.

A midwifery angel came and did the paperwork and tidy up for me. Three babies in two days is not good planning, I had hit the wall. So at 11am after working for 26 hours straight I crawled into my bed.

And the phone DIDN’T ring!!!

PS: I was out to dinner later that week when all the messages came in saying I was on the telly! That I was famous lol 😉! What on earth? Turns out the news show ‘The Project’ did a feature on the state of midwifery in NZ. They had mentioned my blog and blown up quotes from it. I got a full 20 seconds! So that was pretty cool, it got me some more readers too. Please keep sharing my posts, you can sign up to the blog and not have to catch it on FB too. The more people that read the more that will understand and help us to have a voice as we fight to keep this service for our kiwi women.

Thanks to you all, it was very humbling 💕