Babies babies babies babies babies!

It's awfully presumptious to say that I "delivered" someone's baby. I mean really, really, really, she did all the work. So I will say that I caught a baby yesterday. All by myself for the first time!

She was 5cm dilated and her water had just broken when the midwife handed me the delivery package and told me to take over. Since she had 5cm more to go, I figured I had a fair amount of time to prepare. It took me about three minutes to find a gown that fit me: the ER had large, extra large, and extra extra large gowns placed on the shelves labeled large, medium, and small, respectively. I finally settled on large, and hurried back into the delivery cubicle (our delivery center is a teeny bit overcrowded).


Then the gloves. Now these are sterile gloves. The point of them is to open the package and put them on while touching only the insides so that the outer glove doesn't become contaminated by the amusement park for bacteria that is my hands. This is not a difficult thing to do. I however, get all shaky and weird whenever I'm being watched, and cannot seem to put the things on without contaminating them, tearing them, ending up with three fingers in the pinky hole, or all of the above at once.

So of course now, with the midwife, the nurse, the patient, and the top of the baby's head all staring at me, I had no chance. I misaligned the fingers and spent at least three minutes awkwardly squinching my fingers against each other trying to inch the glove onto my index finger as, to my horror, the baby's entire head suddenly appeared on the bed.

The nurse strongly suggested that perhaps I should stop playing with my gloves and consider delivering the baby in question.

I did as instructed, clamped and cut the cord, drew cord blood, massaged the uterus, and delivered the placenta without dropping or breaking anything (or anyone).

And it was a boy!

While I have no desire to be an obstetrician, and despite my feelings about our delivery ward (I would prefer to give birth to quadruplet porcupines alone in a rice paddy in a snowstorm than spend even part of my delivery at this hospital - another story for another time) this is definitely the most joyful thing that happens in a hospital. It's neat to have been a part of it. Today was a day that made me start feeling like maybe just meeeeeebeeeee I might be able to do this whole doctor thing.

That feeling will instantaneously dissolve the next time I have to put an IV in or take arterial blood gasses or do a pelvic exam. But it's a nice feeling.

Even better, today was free HIV test day. Negative, baby!