OK so yesterday we got called in to The Rand at 6:15am as there was a mom in labour. We arrived to help her - a 20 year old first time mom. Large and loud but lovely! We had to laugh at one point because she asked us when she could have her tubes tied! Jen and I helped her all morning through her trials and tribulations and I caught her healthy boy just before lunch. Right after that we were told that the delivery room was to be transformed into an operating room (theatre) as the main OR was having power outages! Well you would not believe the commotion - first our one and only delivery room was emptied into the hallway, a cleaning crew went in and bleached the floor and walls, and then all manner of operating equipment went in there. We had to empty our other labour room (keep in mind there are only 2 labour rooms) and transform it into a delivery room. During all of this we had an 18 year old mom in active labour who Jen and I were assisting. In the middle of all this a bunch of women all showed up at once, 2 women in active labour and 2 women with pregnancy related health issues, all needing to be triaged and addressed. Chaos reigned. One of the women who came in was a multip at 7-8cm, so we assumed she would need the delivery room first. Wrong! Our little 18 year old first time mom got busy with Jen's incredible assistance and I caught her little boy in the labour room while another mom laboured on the other side of the curtain behind me. Then I went across the hallway and caught another boy to our multip, and then managed her postpartum hemorrhage, while simultaneously checking on the mom across the hallway who was getting busy too. Keep in mind there are loads of OR personnel walking by and chatting loudly in the hallway... and we hadn't even started with the paperwork, let alone have anything to eat or drink. By this time it's 8pm and I was desperately trying to catch up on the charting (making sense of all the little notes I had scribbled to myself on scraps of paper), and Jen was floating in the postpartum ward assisting the new moms with breastfeeding. While I was doing this the second of the 2 OR surgeries that had taken place in our delivery room/OR was finishing up and an elderly man lay snoring on a gurney right behind me... I was tempted to reach over and give him a push to shut him up but thought better of it. We left tired but satisfied that we had made a difference and been of invaluable assistance to the staff.
For those of you who think all we have done here is lay on the beach here are the facts:
We have yet to lay on the beach
We have had one scheduled full day off
We have attended 13 births. Of those Helen has managed 10. She has a very sore arm from protecting perineums but does not regret it.
When not attending births at the hospital we assist in the postpartum ward visiting and educating "our" moms
We phone into the hospital every morning to check in - if there is no-one in labour we run along the gorgeous beach and/or do schoolwork. Yes it is lovely and we are enjoying it.
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