Exactly What Are You Saying?

They told me I had to enroll in college before I discovered life. Austin said it as I passed through the door; he called after me as he stood in his sock feet, scarf draped around his neck. Years later, ZiZi said it again. "How could you ever expect to live life without that invaluable social experience? You're so sheltered."

I tried to explain. I told them about the invitation to the UK, to work among Travellers; the place in South Africa, in Mauritania; the China teaching post. I mentioned the classics, my pen, the people racing at breakneck speed through a sleepy town; Japanese, the breath of the wind on my face and freedom from obligation to a pointless expense. Memories rose at my bidding; they gathered about in a great rustling and flurry. I spoke of the Canadaian researcher, the television producer and her husband. There were the doctors there. Babies. A vast group of smiles. People I loved.

"You should have college ambition."

The words wink out behind me. I am kneeling on the floor, Doppler in one gloved hand as I wait for the mother's contraction to subside. It does not. She is speaking of pushing - no, she is pushing. Acadmic social life is the farthest from my mind at the moment.

The baby's head is coming down through the birth canal, smooth and swift. I can feel it there with my one finger, but it is not yet visible. Soon, I tell her, even though she already knows. She rocks back and forth on her hands and knees and grunts, breathing heavily in between pushes.

His crowning is beautiful. His mother breathes him out, bearing down gently and bringing his head out into the air of the room. Since she is on her hands and knees beside the bed, the baby is facing up towards her tailbone. I look down at his chubby cheeks and scrunched eyes and watch the liquid pour from his mouth and nose as his lungs are squeezed dry in preparation for his first breath. His face is blue. Very blue.

The blueness does not worry me. A baby pushed quickly through the pelvis in minutes often looks bluer than a baby with twenty minutes of pushing; though I don't understand the physiological reason for this, I've seen it happen often. Sliding one finger in beside his neck, I check for any loop of umbilical cord that might have tangled around his throat. I feel no cord, but my fingertip touches his tiny, wiggling hand, pressed up close to his shoulder.

Even though his colour isn't a reason to fear, I would rather have him out than in, free to fill his lungs with oxygen and turn a happy shade of pink. "Go ahead and push," I tell the mother. She bears down, effort bringing forth a sound Ooomph, but there is no gentle swish of shoulders following the head from the vagina. I check again with a finger, this time for a shoulder that might have gotten hooked up on her pelvic bone. His shoulders are not stuck, at least not much. He refuses to budge.

It happens that this birth I am attending with one assistant from the office. I've acted as primary midwife many a time, but there was always an older and wiser woman to stand beside me and assume responsibility if anything went wrong. Now, there is no older and wiser woman to guide me. I am the midwife. I am responsible for what happens here. And the baby is not coming.

I glance at my watch, call out a time, and let time go. I am aware of nothing but the baby, and my own breathing. I wiggle him from side to side. If this does not work, mother is going to have to flip over onto her back to jostle the baby free. If that fails...

If that fails, then it's time to worry.

There. Apparently responding to my jiggling, the baby's shoulders give way and he slides into my hands. I don't see the cord at first, tangled around his shoulder and looped once around his neck. Then I see it there, and spin him around to free him from it. He lays in my hands, limp. I rub him over with a blanket, talking to him and the parents at once. "Good job, Annie. Come on, baby; time to join us." Every few seconds he gives a short wheezing gasp.

His delayed start to breathing isn't a problem, even though I keep a close eye on his colour and muscle tone. The umbilical cord, still atached to his placenta, is supplying him with oxygen. I keep rubbing him down, wiping his face and tickling his feet and spine. He grimaces - his reflexes are quite intact. Slowly, he picks up and begins breathing normally.

We get mother back up in bed and lay him on her bare tummy. "Talk to your baby, stimulate him. He's doing great." We whisk the soaking pads into the garbage and clear the floor space, all the while keeping a close eye on his colour. By the time five minutes has passed, a pink tinge is creeping over his torso. His head is still blue, and his hands and feet, but it is no cause for concern.

Later, after mother and baby are tucked into bed and the room tidied, she looks up at me. "This isn't the type of job most girls your age have. What do your friends think?" Before I have a chance to reply, her eyes widen. "Do you even have any friends?"

I laugh. "A few."

Mom has come with her bags, so we can finish the newborn exam. She smiles. "Some of her cousins keep trying to tell her she needs to go to college so she gets a real taste of life -"

Annie interrupts - "Yeah. How are you going to meet any boys like this? And even if you did meet a boy..." She pauses, trying to collect her thoughts. "They're going to say, 'She's a /midwife/.'"

"In that case, I think I'll stick with midwifery," I inform her.

The feel of the baby limp in my hands stays with me as I pack our bags and clear the room. I am grateful he required no resuscitation, and that whatever dystocia occurred was mild. We bid each other good night and leave, heading for home with two hours left until clinic. An hour of sleep is better than none at all, right?

Curled in the passenger seat of the car, I recall ZiZi's earnest plea. "Go to college, Donny. Get a life." My eyelids are drooping. I'm tired. Through the fog of exhaustion, I wonder where she's at now, and if she's sleeping.

So they want me in college so I can get a life.

Princess will be waiting for me when I get home, face scrubbed shiny clean and mouth making kissy sounds as I dive into the sofa for an hour of sleep. Then clinic - ten hours of counseling and caring for women in all walks of life, each possessing their own problems and concerns. There will be discussions, arguments, humour, and friendly banter. And fangirling, because when it comes to Downton Abbey, even ladies in their fifties will squee. In the evening there will be Bacon and I shall do some squeeing of my own.

Yes indeed, silly people. Life.

Of all the Nonesuch

One of my continuity of care clients came in to clinic today with her two-week-old baby. Being slightly less busy than normal, I took two moments to stop in the waiting room and talk to her. She's looking bright and cheery... and dreadfully suspicious. I ask her how breastfeeding is going. "Oh," she says. "I'm not nursing anymore."

 

My jaw is clenched too tightly to hit the floor. Three housecalls. THREE HOUSECALLS we made to aid her in nursing her baby, her own pigheadedness foiling our best attempts to help. Five days ago we dropped in to ensure everything was going well, and were met by a happy smile and a baby who was no longer starving. "It's going beautifully," she assured us from her rocking chair, beaming.

 

And now this. Five days later she walks through the clinic door and informs me that she's quit nursing for good. "I pumped for a few days and just didn't have enough milk, so I decided I just can't do it with this baby. Maybe another baby." 

 

I am chewing on my tongue to keep from saying exactly what is exploding in supernovas through my head. You are obnoxious. If you'd have listened when we told you that you'd have to work at building up your milk supply and getting your nipple-confused baby back to the breast... if you'd have come to childbirth classes when we pleaded with you instead of smiling and assuring us your sisters all got by with nothing of the sort... if you'd have done what we said when we came out to your house instead of diagnosing the baby with a fingernail clippers on a string and proceeding to shake the kid silly because "she's gone and come down with pneumonia"... If you hadn't starved your baby for the first week of life because you couldn't take advice from your midwife and just had to take it from yourself - !

 

There are days when I drink coffee to stay awake, and there are days when I drink coffee so that something hot is going down to my stomach and not coming up into someone's face. Today is one of the latter.

 

For further measure I pop horehound cough drops into my mouth - three in a row - and retreat to the back of the room, after I beg the assistance of our lactation consultant. "Amy, can I have you? /Please/?" This is beyond me.

 

There are days, too, when I wonder why I'm a student midwife and not a full-time novelist. I sit on the exam table and the client sits on the chair across from me while I consider retiring from apprenticeship and making a profession out of my pen. Blimey! If only I could.

 

The cough drops work wonders. My TMJ keeps me from opening my mouth to snap around the hard candy, so I am effectively silenced. This pleases me. My brain was getting tired of keeping my lips closed.

 

It takes twice the time of her scheduled appointment to persuade her to keep on with breastfeeding, and even then no one is sure that she actually acknowledged anything we said. After clinic is over we sit around the kitchen table and discuss the possibility that she has pospartum depression, and is quitting breastfeeding because that's easier than relinquishing her cocky attitude to admit she needs help. While talking, I update my counts and realize that I'm almost finished with the documented clinical portion of my apprenticeship. I just need to be primary attendant at seven more births, and perform eight newborn exams and eight postpartum exams. Oh yes. And study for the skills and knowledge portion of the NARM exam.

 

We settle that the lactation consultant is going to visit her home for weekly check-ups, in order to track the baby's weight gain and ensure that breastfeeding is going well.

 

Outside, it's begun to sleet. I log onto Skype for a few minutes of conversation before heading home. Across the table, my preceptor and coworker are discussing the itinerary for the upcoming conference on breech birth. My preceptor is speaking there on breech complications, and she needs help in organizing her presentation. I, being tired, do not volunteer. Instead, I go and bring up her van.

 

Once home I inspect my word count for NaNoWriMo and realize that I am probably going to fail miserably despite my efforts. This irks me. To console myself I memorize the word of the day - nonesuch. Noun. A person or thing that has no equal.

 

It describes my continuity of care client perfectly. She is a nonesuch.

 

I go grimly to writing.

Insomnia

There is no better time to update a blog than when you need an excuse to procrastinate.

 

Yes, I should be sleeping. It happens that my days and nights are upended, and I can't. This has something to do with the fact that the hours between eleven pm and four am are silent hours.

 

Yes, I should be writing. Unfortunately, my capacity for NaNo-ing is limited at two in the morning. I can manage pseudo-ninja scribbling on sleep, but not when I'm so exhausted that my brain is dwindling into a moronic fog.

 

My word quota is filled for these first two days; certainly not in excess. I'm managing the minimum word count for each day so far, and if I keep up that routine for the next twenty-eight days I will be satisfied. After all, I'm doing this in bits and pieces - three hundred words here, two sentences here. I can manage a hundred words a minute, provided I write with no distractions and no interference from my dear little editor. That means that 50K in a month /is/ possible, even working full time and studying for a certain monumental exam.

 

I slept last night from three-thirty to six on a reclining chair in a house I'd never seen. Periodic episodes of noisy vomiting (coming from the other room) roused me. When I woke up, I studied Japanese, particularly differentiating between participles /wa/ and /ga/. The rest of the morning was spent in aiding with the delivery of a baby, where I was primary attendant [under supervision]; when she came, she breathed well, but stayed completely floppy for almost ten minutes. In attending over one hundred births I had never seen such a happening. I made a note to look up oxygen deprivation and neonatal depression in the near future.

 

Towards evening I slept a bit, thanks to a mandate from the Head of the Household. At nine I woke up; at eleven I crept downstairs. I finished my word quota at twelve thirty.

 

I am now listening to Sara Bareilles singing "King of Anything". (You sound so innocent, all full of good intent; swear you know best. ... You've got the talking down, but not the listening...) When it is finished I'll wake up my feet, look up a vocabulary word to text my cousin in the morning, and list gift projects in the order they must be completed. Oh. And record that song for Wain, so I can post the link along with the poem.

 

In the morning I'll attempt to sleep.

 

Procrastination is a lovely thing.

Only a Female

Dear friends,

 

For your enjoyment, the beginning half of a post I began in early September.

 This past week has been mildy engrossing. Since Wednesday, I have not slept a single night; between babies and scrabbling, genius is burned [out]. Jo in her scribble-suit, apples and inkwell in hand, could and would do a hundred times better - as for me, my pen has been replaced with blue nitrile exam gloves, lancets, and a pediatric stethascope. I write, but very little of it is creative. Letters are left without replies (though this cannot be excused on the basis of little sleep and no time: I have been in the habit of year-long silences since my days as a six-year-old cousin correspondent). My fondly-cherished writing projects are incomplete and untouched. I console myself with E. B. White's assertation that the best writer is the writer who has lived at least forty years of his life, and go on shamelessly neglecting my stories; leaving behind beloved characters and spending my inspiration in catching slippery little fish-babies, teaching laboring mothers to dance, and reviewing the endless steps of neona  tal resuscitation. I used to read novels to unwind. Now I spend my spare time after work playing with a model pelvis and a baby doll, Anne Frye opened on my lap to page three-hundred-and-fifty-seven, teaching myself the maneuvers to extract a breech baby who has gotten herself stuck. Life is interesting.

 

 Given the fact that I must be at clinic by seven-thirty tomorrow morning, and given that it is almost midnight, I should be in bed. Instead, I shall go get a bowl of shredded wheat and continue on with this blog post.

 

 

Yes, I continued writing. No, you are not going to see what I wrote - it testifies only that my ability to reason left me once I reached the kitchen.

 

Moving on to other things...

 

This will, I expect, be the first and the last you shall ever read from me on the subject of shoes. I don't consider myself especially girly - I'll take black over pink any day, and prefer leather boots and denim jackets to frilly blouses. I never believed I would be so ridiculous as to find excitement in a pair of shoes.

 

Unfortunately, I discovered that I do indeed have a girly side. It happened when I paced up and down the aisle in GoodWill, hunting for a decent pair of shoes to wear to work now that fall is arriving and sandals are no longer suitable. (I usually possess two pairs of shoes at any given time of the year. One pair is for sloshing about in mud puddles or snowy ditches, and the other is for everything else.) Since my feet are a bit on the larger side, and since I am rather particular about a certain 'look' for my footwear, I was getting frustrated with the selection. At some point I found myself staring at a fanciful pair of heels, impractical, blue, covered with little flowers. I tried them on for a laugh and promptly fell over.

 

For your information, I have one pair of high-heeled shoes. It is the only pair of heels I have ever owned to date, and I bought it three weeks ago because I simply couldn't find anything else within my price range for wearing to my cousin's wedding. I absolutely refused to go wearing scuffed black clogs. I've used a permanent marker on scuffs before, but there's only so many times that it works, and it is not the sort of thing one does for weddings. Especially not weddings of cousins.

 

Anyway. I continued shoe shopping. I tried on a few respectable pairs, steered safely clear of the horrid 'granny' shoes, and acquired one pair of indigos. Then I went back to the other rack and picked up those blue shoes. They were just too ridiculously cute. I looked at them a bit, set them down, and stalked away to the dress section. (GoodWill's dress rack holds either tent-like pieces that once belonged to two-hundred-and-fifty-pound matrons, or slinky little dresses that could only have come out of the closet of a eighty-three-pound anorexic. I am neither.) After an exasperating browse, I returned to the the shoes. "For a laugh," I told Mum, mostly as an excuse for buying them. "I'll show them to the girls." Sheepishly, I carried them to the checkout and paid for them.

 

Once safely home, I flew to the basement and dumped my bags on the floor, then reached for the blue heels. I slipped them onto my feet and danced - /danced/ - around the great sewing room. I strutted, clicked my heels together, and piroetted. And I didn't fall over once. I didn't even wobble.
 

A pair of shoes has never made me so happy. I expect no pair ever will.

 

 

 

 

 

Not bad for three ninety-seven, ne? And this is the girl who said just the other day that heels are only a game of seeing how long a lady can avoid breaking her ankle.

Only the Beginning of the Adventure

Welcome, dear friends.

 

It has been weeks, perhaps months, since I first created this blog. Why is the opening post so long in coming? To be frank, I have been at a loss for words. While thoughts swirl in my head, asking to be written, the coherent inspiration has not come, and I have been too lazy to sit down and work until a post is prepared.

 

When I set up this blog, I envisioned it as the corner from which I would write to the world. I wanted to use it to build a platform of words through which I could make connections and fashion a reputation in the blogging world. Lately, though, I have been drifting away from my original idea. I am discovering that - despite what I may have believed - I don't have much to say to the world after all. I have no agenda to push, no product to sell, no image to polish. All I have are two empty hands, a heart passionate about many things, and a pencil.

 

The hands pick up the pencil, and I write from my heart.

 

And where does that leave this blog?

 

At least for now, I am going to keep it small - and private. If you are here reading this, it is probably because you have been asked to come. Because this is not going to be about self-promotion. This has nothing to do with the literary career I once anticipated having. Instead, I will be writing... well, letters. Yes, letters; letters from one friend to another. What is published in this blog will be personal, in a way that I had not planned when I first opened my Blogger account.

 

There are many things on my heart. I want to share them with you, and I hope you will share in return. Perhaps some of the things will be silly. I may write about manga, or random things such as dust bunnies and how they clutter up the corners along with the plot bunnies. Some days I may write about more sobering things, like the orphans in Bulgaria, or the night I held a baby in my hands and watched her die. But whatever it is that I scribble in these notes to you, it is my life. These are the things that I live, and breathe, and believe. This is the beating of my heart.

 

Will you join me here, in the quiet corner of my existence? Bring your pencils, your pens, your parchment paper. In my own clumsy way I will write you into my world. And perhaps someday, if what you see moves your heart, you will write back.

 

L<3VE,

 

Donny