Life on L&D

Yay, birthing babies is fun, for the most part. Thursdays seem to be my lucky day as the FP resident isn't there to take all the patients and it's quite busy. I got to help out on 2 deliveries on Thursday, which was nice after not seeing a vaginal delivery in a week. It's quite emotional sometimes, especially for the women giving birth to her first child and the FOB (father of baby, silly) is involved, and family is supportive. Compared with the sad story from one of my classmates, who had a patient who was pregnant with a child that was conceived when she was raped while trying to cross the border into the US. AND her husband isn't happy about it, she wasn't one to have a termination, so it's quite distressing for everybody. We had a discussion about the limits that we will have as physicians, even if we want to do all that we can for "justice," we can only do so much. But hopefully it's enough to keep the patient going.

I did a pseudo-overnight shift on Friday night because I was determined to follow this one woman to delivery. She was an induction, so I knew it would go kinda slow, but as dinner time rolled around and she was still not that dilated, I knew I could take a little dinner break at home. Back at the hospital at 9PM, she was at 5 cm. Baby had some late decels, which was worrisome, even with amnioinfusions. It was gonna be a loong night....took a 2 hour nap around midnight, and when I went back to her room, she said I looked just as I did that morning. Nice. She finally delivers around 3 AM, and there is a true knot in the umbilical cord. It was neat, the baby really did some acrobatics to achieve that. So that explains the problems! My mom said you can tell if there's a knot based on the heart tracing. Didn't know that, but it's useful information. More "shouldering" or something on the decel. Got home at 4:30 AM, and I think I'm recovered from the sleep schedule disturbance.

1.5 more weeks to go before shelf exam time. Then I really lose the sleep on Internal Medicine....