A first

Today I signed my first birth registration papers as a registered midwife. Somewhere in the universe a little boy will be registered with ME as the certifying midwife. Yay! A small but significant milestone (skipping).

Today was my first day back on labour and birth suite (LBS). I saw 4 babies born today, the first at 7.45am answering an assist bell with a mild shoulder dystocia for which I called a paediatric code blue (he was ok, just stunned for a minute or so), the second at 10.54am by CS, the third at 11.55am by CS and the fourth at 1.07pm also by CS (it was my day to be oriented as the Section Queen). All sweet fat healthy babies (3.4-4.48 kg) and lovingly welcomed by their parents. Tomorrow I hope to see some babies birthing from women I know better! -through hopefully having cared for them for a couple of hours in labour.

I also stocked a room (thereby reminding myself of what goes/can be found where) and spent the remainder of the shift doing paperwork and weighing placentas etc. We were busy, but not as busy as the staff on the wards who were under pressure to get the women out the door to make way for the next one! One ward refused to take a baby from us due to lack of midwives (uh-oh) holding up the list, which made an anaesthetist speak rudely to us about the delay (sigh) which gave us all a pain in the proverbial, but we smiled sweetly and our day still finished on time.

I made a bit of a mess with clamping and cord cutting. I was surprised to find my hands shaking as I went to clamp the first one in theatre. Slippery, bleedy, spurty little suckers those cords but all of a nice fat size and easy to take cord gas samples from (phew). I remembered how to do all the data entry stuff, and what samples to send where and with which stickers for the Rhesus negative Mums. Birth is certainly a messy business. Midwives would recognise the smell of blood ANYWHERE.

It was good to be back. There was even a slowly labouring term-ish breech planning to birth vaginally. Hope she goes OK. I'll find out tomorrow.

My feet are sore but I still feel like skipping! AND I'm smiling. Yay for me! I like this job!