When It's Someone You Love

I thought I knew what it's like to be with someone in labor. And I did, in a sense. With my patients. My patients are lovely and amusing and sometimes frustrating but brave and powerful and utterly remarkable. But I am their midwife, and they are my patients, and those are our roles.  

Two weeks ago, my oldest friend had a baby. She is brave and powerful and amazing, just like my patients are, but I am not her midwife and so I was a wreck. I was a wreck because I love her so much and I loved her baby even before she was born and I didn't know how different it was to be with someone, really with someone in that space, someone that you love. 

I drove the six hours to be with her because I couldn't imagine missing it. I met her boyfriend for the first time when I got there, and gladly accepted hugs from her mother, who I've called "Mom" for as long as I can remember.

I made her walk the halls with me for four hours and we caught up on life as it is now, and reminisced about our high school antics until she couldn't talk during her contractions and we were running out of ice chips. I tried very hard not to hover over her when the midwife would check her cervix, and I tried to be helpful to her nurses who were, every one of them, so kind. I listened carefully to everything every doctor and midwife said and then explained it all again to her family, drawing little diagrams in the air when the baby turned out to be OP, and explaining what the fetal monitor meant with all its squiggly lines.

I held her hand and dozed in between her contractions, because her epidural only took the edge off and she woke up with every one. Twice, through a haze of Nubain and Benadryl, she woke up and looked at me and told me, "I'm so glad you're here. I couldn't do this without you," and I smiled and told her there was nowhere I'd rather be. She closed her eyes again and I felt like breaking open as a tear leaked down my nose because I wanted to take all her pain and hold it inside me and bury it deep but I couldn't.

I changed the pad under her every time she felt wet, and I made her open her eyes and look at me when she couldn't stop saying, I can't, I can't, I can't, and I told her that yes she could, she already was, and to squeeze my hand as hard as it hurt and to push through the pain even though it felt impossible.

And in the end, after the consent had been signed and her epidural was bolused, I pulled the curtain around us and sat on her bed and told her that it wasn't her fault, that the baby wasn't moving down because of how her head was positioned and that she did such a good job, the best job ever, and that everything was going to be okay. I told her how brave she was, and how strong she had been, and how after 48 hours of labor, the doctors were right, it was time for a Cesarean.

They wheeled her away and I fell apart. I felt like I'd failed her, like I'd let down my oldest and dearest friend by not being able to doula her out of an OP, asynclitic and unflexed baby's head. I am blessed to have midwifery friends who very gently and matter-of-factly pointed out how ridiculous that was.

So I waited till she was out of surgery, and helped her get the baby latched on, and stayed just a tiny bit longer and then drove all the way back to Connecticut in the wee hours of the night, already missing her sweet face and the baby's soft downy hair. 

I couldn't be her midwife, but that was okay. Because I am so lucky to be her friend.

The First

The first birth was awful.

I wanted it to be amazing. I wanted it to make me feel like a real midwife, like I could be good at this thing that I am both in love with and utterly terrified of. Instead, this woman I was with, she was only a couple of years younger than me and she did not trust me. In hindsight, this does not faze me. I get it. I'm 26, I was doing a less than spectacular job at faking any semblance of aptitude or confidence, and she was just done. Done with her contractions, done with the baby's father talking on his phone while she was racked with pain, done with her mother-in-law asking loudly when the hospital was going to do paternity testing because she was sure, she was positive that this baby was not her son's, and of course, done with the student midwife even being in the same room as her. So I did my best and offered to my preceptor to sit this one out and merely observe, in a genuine attempt to respect this woman's wishes, and was met with deaf ears.

"This is a teaching hospital. She needs to get over it."

Um, okay. Wow.

So in the end, no one was happy. My preceptor was annoyed that I dropped my hands away from the baby's head when the mother screamed, "No!! Don't touch me!" I was done trying to walk a fine line between respecting a person's body integrity and right to refuse whatever the hell they want to refuse - including having a student catch your baby - and trying to please whichever random "teacher" I'm spending a given 12 hours with. I was shaken by being so despised, in that moment, by someone who didn't know me at all, and - I'll admit - I was hurt and upset and took the whole thing far too personally. I grazed the baby's ears as they emerged and then, a few minutes later, managed to very messily deliver the placenta with shaking hands, waiting to be screamed at again by someone (anyone, really).

Ten minutes later, we were sitting in the chart room and my preceptor says matter-of-factly, "Okay, great. So that was your first catch. Here's the birth certificate, can you fill this out? Front and back."

I nodded, smiled, and excused myself to the bathroom where I sat on the floor, shivering uncontrollably, and took deep cleansing breaths until I'd breathed out all the adrenaline and guilt and fear and disappointment and anger and confusion until I was an empty shell of somebody calm and detached and wholly unlike me. That night, in the dark of my bedroom, I finally gave in to the sharp stab of hurt at being unwanted, of being terrible at something I so badly want to be excellent at, but mostly, at feeling such overwhelming sadness and guilt that I had been a part of something awful. Of a woman having a birth that was not her own, and not what she wanted. I hated everything about my implicitness in that.

If I've learned anything so far in school, it's that resiliency is far more important than aptitude. I still hate that school is a place where I am not the midwife I will be one day. Where I jump at the chance to perform amniotomies and place intrauterine pressure catheters because if I don't do those things now, I'll never learn how. Where I'm at the mercy and whims of every single preceptor, all of whom want different things, and none of whom are wrong. Where I spend 12 exhausting hours doing labor support for a primip only to be told to walk away at 7 PM so that the ER resident can catch her baby at 7:15. But - and this is a big but - the moments of wet squalling babies whooshing out on a wave of fluid, the pulsing cords, the reaching hands, and the tears that cross every language barrier in the room, those moments remind me why I'm here.

And they're what have finally brought me back to writing, after far too long.

Birth

You know what's awesome about birth, babe?

What's that?

It's like...today was one of the biggest days of these two women's entire lives, because their babies were born, and - and - you get to be there for it.  And for me - all it is is Thursday.  But for them - it's a day that they'll never forget.  I can't believe I get to be there for all of those days for the rest of my life.

Well, I can't think of anyone better to be there for them than you.

I'm so lucky.  I just can't believe how lucky I am.

So are they, he tells me.  And I laugh because this can't possibly be my life.

And yet it is.

Welcome to the world, baby girls.  Today was an awesome day to be born.