Embrace

Here comes another oldie but goodie. This masterpiece was made when I was still working on Labor & Delivery and man oh man, it's so funny. In the moment, I obviously wasn't thinking about laughing or crying. More just the baby getting delivered. Read more for this intertwined birth story. I promise it's not gruesome. <3 Love you, mean it.

“Anotha day, anotha dolla.”It’s my go-to saying at work. Let me just tell you fam, when I say people that work at the hospital have been busting their a** for the past two years, it’s an absolutely real statement. With COVID still at large and Omicron ruining our 2021 holidays, please do me a favor and check on your healthcare professional friends, or any of your friends who work at a healthcare facility for that matter. #wearenotokay The grind has been real and they have been at it for a good two years now. Burnout at healthcare facilities is valid, to say the least, especially with the CDC starting to cut back on sick time due to staffing shortages instead of ensuring the health and well being of the providers caring for the sick. When the roles are reversed, there is no empathy for those who have been at the frontlines, moreso a lack of understanding and blatant care for any of us. Lots of tension among our professional work lives definitely calls for something to lighten the mood. Obviously, this is also to relieve my personal stress, if you haven’t come to that conclusion already… Today brings a story that whenever I think about it, it grosses me out and at the same time makes me giggle a little more than usual.

Work in Labor and Delivery can be fast paced, or drawn out. This shift in particular seemed to be the latter, until it wasn’t. I didn’t have any patients and a woman was brought up in a wheelchair, shouting in pain, profusely sweating, pale face, mouth agape breathing heavily and legs wider than they should be for a pregnant woman in a wheelchair… seemingly pending an imminent delivery. We bring her straight into a room to be admitted and although we tell her not to, she starts to push. (Side note: theres A LOT and I mean A LOT to do during a delivery and when a patient comes in ready to deliver, its all hands on deck) Nurses, PAs (Physician Assistants), Scrub techs, unit clerks all scrambling to get the admission process done quickly to get this patient into the so once she delivers, we can get all the baby information and paperwork in case of an emergent situation. With an overwhelming amount of people in the room, I step out to grab some extra equipment and come back to hone in on the patient flailing her legs all over the place and a PA doing a vaginal exam. Everything was still in the process of being set up for delivery, meanwhile the patient was already crowning. The PA urgently requests that I grab a leg so that she can deliver without causing any harm to the baby or blocking the baby by any means of coming out. I attempt to grab her leg quickly, but instead I manage to palm the ball of her foot and wrap my fingers around the top. Then it hits me. My bare, gloveless fingers are intertwined with her bare, sockless toes. Welp, there’s no turning back now. The baby is coming out and her legs need to stay back. I make full eye contact with the patient and redirect her pain into her pushing so that she can easily push this baby out and also intentionally release this very very very uncomfortable and unnecessary physical contact. But with the pain and contraction, she pushes down and simultaneously as an automated response (I guess, but how dare she) clenches her painstakingly sweaty toes into my poor fingers *cries on the inside*, two pushes, ten seconds each. A summation of 20 seconds in this very uncomfortably crucial embrace. Baby is out. I place her foot on the stirrup and say my usual “happy birthday baby!” and wash my hands so hard that they disintegrate.