Friday Night

I was first on last night with Laverne. When you are first on at night you have to be at the clinic... you can sleep but you have to do it there. And when I say sleep I mean curl up in a fetal position on a circa 1985 mattress on top of the coverlet and try desperately to squeeze an hour or two of sleep. Because Laverne is really entertaining I stayed up until 1:45 chatting with her and then the doorbell rang at 2:00 with a woman in labor. I checked her, did the basic prenatal stuff, got her settled and about an hour later it rang again with another laboring woman.

What sucks is that if you are first on they are your clients until the shift change and then if they are not imminent you have to turn your charts over and leave. So, you spend their labors with them and do all that stuff only to have to give them up in the end. Conversely if you come on shift and a woman has had her baby you will have to take over vitals, paperwork, discharge, and cleaning and laundry even if it wasn't your catch. There are a lot of elements about this experience that are going to make homebirth seem so much easier, hell, they're going to make my everyday housework load seem like a boring piece of cake.

So, at 6:15 I came back over here to the intern house and crashed so hard I missed the code to observe the birth. When the head is crowning they will call a code to whichever birth room the client is in but when they coded it all I heard was "blah blah blah" so I knew I was probably too tired to stumble over there. I slept until 12:30 and then Katie and I went thrifting and out to lunch. It was awesome to get off the grounds further than the Q grocery store.

I'm off tonight but first on tomorrow which is kind of sucky because we are closed on Sunday maybe I will get some registrations - I desperately need initial visits for my paperwork.