It's been a crazy few weeks and I sometimes wonder what the hell I am doing - then I go to a birth and realise it is because in my soul I am a midwife and was always meant to be a midwife!
Events in last three weeks - Matt's arm (which will be in plaster for four more weeks), Nana's funeral, assignments, births and lectures - not to mention moving house and trying to organise builders, kitchens blah blah blah. I feel that I need to just hop off for a day, take a deep breath and get back into it.
We have got assessments an exam coming up for Midwifery Practice plus two assignments due for the Research paper (which I HATE!) as well as attending clinic and births. It is very full on and I'm starting to panic a bit. The midwifery stuff I feel relatively confident on, but the research paper is giving me major headaches and nightmares! My last assignment I had felt was OK but just got it back with a D on one of the learning outcomes - it was very disappointing and the paper is an online paper with the lecturers not being particularly approachable. This is one paper where I will definitely be giving fairly robust feedback on.
We presented our community project on monday, and after a bit of nervousness we presented an awesome project and were very happy with the way it went. One more job off the list.
Tuesday night was the last session for antenatal and I've got the next series off, so that will give me a bit more down time. It was a great group and I will miss them - we had lots of meaty discussions and loads of fun! I was still there chatting to them at 10pm when I got the call from Matty that our woman's waters had broken and that she was contracting but didn't want to move so I needed to race to hospital, meet another midwife and get a homebirth kit. So I raced in and picked up the kit. We'd just got it into my car when Matty phoned and said they'd managed to convince the mum to come into hospital. I went up and waited at the midwives station and did a couple of little bits for Lyndon (the other midwife). Eventually Matty turned up with the mum and her partner. We raced around getting her admitted and doing paperwork and setting up the room. They arrived at 2250 and at 0022 baby was born. We gloved up and Matty said to me "you can catch" and then we were looking at the head and realised baby was a complete posterior which explained why mum was in so much pain! So at 0022 I caught my second baby, a little girl. She needed a little oxygen at about 20 minutes after birth but came right, fed well and is just adorable. I showered mum and did some of the baby check and Matty did paperwork and the transfer and we managed to get mum over to Postnatal ward pretty quickly.
I got home at 3.30am and had a nice long shower, a cup of tea and a sandwhich and massaged my feet which were very sore (I was in my "dressy" clothes from work - so had full make-up, boots and not my normal midwife attire!) and I was just getting into bed when Steve's alarm went off, so had a quick chat with him and then grabbed a couple of hours sleep before my day started!
