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Birth of a Midwife
Birth of a Midwife As a nurse, I was brand new to labor and delivery--and I was on my third night shift in a row. Walking back from a quick break, I was called over by the charge nurse. "You have the next admit from triage," she told me. "She's a live one--and so is her family. They're carnies." "What's that?" I asked, bewildered. "You know, the people who do the circus and carnival circuit--gypsies," she said, innocently using a term that is now considered derogatory, but was then often applied to the nomadic ethnic group known as Roma. "She's going natural." I felt a quiver of anxiety. When it came to giving labor support, I'd created a high bar for myself. I hadn't yet gone through childbirth myself, but for my patients' sake, I assumed that I needed to exude a certain confidence. The real test came when a woman in the throes of a contraction would ask, "Well…do you have any kids yourself?" This challenge felt as great to me as any clinical ordeal I'd ever faced. Okay, I can do this, I told myself, taking a deep breath. This was a busy Saturday night. It was a State Fair weekend, late summer of '89, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Plenty of pregnant women were arriving in triage, dehydrated from their day in the sun. The night had been a string of false labors. The protocol was simple: Hydrate, rest and reassess, then out the door. [...]
