My Cycle

Here is the cycle I go through basically every time I’m on call. I start out in a minor panic as I get report, trying to keep everyone straight in my head, and resist speaking up when I disagree with the reasons someone is being induced (for example). My shift starts and things slowly but surely get under control. On many days, not all but many, things are fairly slow, or at least manageable. I have someone “in labor” who isn’t really in labor and I baby sit her while she gets ripened or gets low dose pit and sits on a birth ball changing her cervix from 1-2 to 2-3 in 12 hours. But then, lo and behold, almost without exception around 5pm things start to pick up at a sometimes alarming pace. More triage patients come in because the office is now closed and patients are making a bee line to the hospital, someone ruptures in the lobby, a nullip calls three times freaking out that her ctx are painful and coming frequently, a patient on the pp floor can’t pee…So, after a completely in-control day, I get bombarded and things start to unravel. Suddenly it’s 7:15pm, the oncoming midwife is on her way upstairs, paper work is only half way done, there are loose ends blowing all over the place and I start to panic (ah we’ve come full circle here) that it will look like I’m just a lazy, disorganized fool who waited until the last minute to do anything. And, the woman who usually takes over for me when I work a Wednesday or a Friday shift (often the two days of the week I am in the hospital) is so hard to read. She almost never laughs at my jokes, she takes report from me without sharing eye contact, barely asks questions, just stays silent, wishes me a good night and head’s out to the floor to, I’m sure, change management plans and do her own thing.

Now, I know that one of the things I need to work on as a new practitioner (and in my life) is to chip away my stellar ability to assume that everyone else’s plan or management decision is way, way, way better than my own. I’m so good at channeling insecurity. Too good on most days. And I am constantly working on finding a balance between confidence and humility. And it is hard, hard work. Trusting yourself, sticking with your choices, knowing, and I mean really knowing, that each decision I make doesn’t directly relate to my worth as a midwife or even as a human being. Why can’t my reflex be to think that that midwife is tired, or weird, or has bad people skills. Instead I think she hates me. Yep, that’s what’s going on here. She resents that I am new, resents that I would not have done things the way she would have and now feels like she has to “clean up” my mess.

Clearly, these topics are just fodder for my weekly therapy sessions. But, in the meantime, I have 2 mantras to recite: my multip mantra as I head into the hospital and now mantra #2 which I will start to meditate on as I leave the hospital in order to quiet the judging voices in my head. I’ll take deep breaths, appreciate the fact that, if nothing else, I am walking out of the hospital and into the now soft spring air. I’ll acknowledge my insecurities but remind myself that it’s okay to be new and that patience, for my development as a midwife, is an essential virtue. And a strong gin and tonic usually helps too.