Yesterday's 24 hour call

So I paid bigtime for all the wonderful and simple births I have had this month. Yesterday's call was stressful :p

I had a lady being induced - she begged in the office to be induced because she was driving three hours one way for her prenatal care. She had some of her previous babies with us and still wanted to see us. Wow, talk about dedication :) Well, we all said no but the doc she saw for a tubal consult had his heart strings tugged from her story so I decided to go along with it. I went and met her for the first time to explain the process and then scheduled her for the next day. That's lady #1.

Lady #2 came in for induction as well, however when I had seen her in the office previously she was already contracting and 3-4/80/-1. She was a primip wanting to go natural. So the plan was just to break her water and see if she would just get going (which she did).

Lady#3 came in during the afternoon - a VBAC attempt with 4 previous vaginal deliveries, she showed up 8cm (according to the nurse).

I had just gone over to the office to see a few patients when I got the call about lady #3. I dumped my patients on the other midwife and headed over to the hospital. I sat at the hospital for about 10 hours before I had the first delivery...grrr. The VBAC attempt was successful after a few hours of watching an occasionally crappy strip with no or little cervical progress...she was really more like 6cm when she arrived. Too high to rupture so I waited and waited for the head to come down. By the time it did she was about 8cm for real. So I rupture her and guess what? Her cervix shrinks back to 6cm...grrr. I leave her alone for a couple more hours...she doesn't change. So we decide to use some 'gentle' pitocin - we started at one mu/min and never got past that. In fact, when she finally kicked in with her contractions we cut the pit off. Well, and not to mention the big decels. That had something to do with it too :p She finally delivered shortly before midnight. I was so glad because the doc I was on with has a low tolerance for 'abnormalitites' during VBAC attempts. He would have had an absolute shitfit had he come in and found out she was there for 10 hours!

Oh, I have to go for now - gotta start getting costumized - I am a zombie midwife :) I will post again tomorrow to finish the tale!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!