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abilouise... a ten minute video that is unusually well-titled. Ten minutes of babies emerging from women's stretching vulvas. I was like COOL! I watched this video in my Labor Assistant/Birth Doula training today, day two of my drinking-from-a-firehose-style 3-day training that starts my odyssey of becoming a certified birth doula. After this part comes the part where I need to find pregnant women to volunteer for the births of. I am overwhelmed, and feel like I can't possibly be REALLY getting trained to do this -- this is way too important for lil' ol' me to do. Supporting women in labor and their partners, being a resource with information, helping them navigate the strange world of hospital birth requires TACT and DIPLOMACY and DECISION MAKING SKILLS and often KEEPING MY MOUTH SHUT and not letting my feelings and prejudices get in their way, whose idea was this for me to do again? Oh right, mine. I am really excited about this and it feels like a brave quest, where I do my part to make this world that I live in more resemble the world that I want to live in.
Today we had volunteer third-trimester women come in and we did fetal palpation and listening to fetal heart tones with a fetascope which was all cool. I've massaged enough pregnant women who were not sick of people touching their bellies that I've sort of done it before, I can usually feel the head and the butt even if I couldn't tell them apart until today when I learned the cool trick for differentiating (too bad nobody has taught this trick to certain US voting-age citizens), basically that if you wiggle the head the body doesn't move but if you wiggle the butt then the torso moves too. So if you meet someone and can't tell their face from their ass, try wiggling it.
Tomorrow we do vaginal exams on each other (it's not a required part of the class, we will learn sterile technique, there will be no speculum, and this will not be part of my scope of practice, it's just a learning experience, to answer all my own questions).
Here's my homework question for tonight and it's hard. it caused good conversation at dinner tonight, and I'm not happy with my answer, so you tell me what you think:
You have just assisted at the most difficult birth you've ever been to. The baby is in the NICU and may not survive. You stop at the grocery store on the way home and run into your client's friend. She asks if your client had had the baby yet and how it all went.
Today we had volunteer third-trimester women come in and we did fetal palpation and listening to fetal heart tones with a fetascope which was all cool. I've massaged enough pregnant women who were not sick of people touching their bellies that I've sort of done it before, I can usually feel the head and the butt even if I couldn't tell them apart until today when I learned the cool trick for differentiating (too bad nobody has taught this trick to certain US voting-age citizens), basically that if you wiggle the head the body doesn't move but if you wiggle the butt then the torso moves too. So if you meet someone and can't tell their face from their ass, try wiggling it.
Tomorrow we do vaginal exams on each other (it's not a required part of the class, we will learn sterile technique, there will be no speculum, and this will not be part of my scope of practice, it's just a learning experience, to answer all my own questions).
Here's my homework question for tonight and it's hard. it caused good conversation at dinner tonight, and I'm not happy with my answer, so you tell me what you think:
You have just assisted at the most difficult birth you've ever been to. The baby is in the NICU and may not survive. You stop at the grocery store on the way home and run into your client's friend. She asks if your client had had the baby yet and how it all went.