Tight shoulders
So, my first week of clinicals ended last week, and I am only just now having an opportunity to sit down and write about it. Let me tell you a bit about my schedule: clinicals take up roughly 42 hours a week—2 labor and delivery shifts and 2 clinic shifts—plus one day a week in class, and every other spare moment devoted to either sleeping, eating or studying (well, and blogging…and watching the occassional episode of 24). Labor and delivery shifts start at 7:30 am for postpartum rounds and don’t finish until 9:00 pm. To get to the hospital on time, I need to leave my house around 6:30 am to account for the vagaries of the subway, which means waking up around 5:45 am (did I mention that this hospital has an absolute THOU SHALT NOT BE LATE policy? If I’m late once, we talk about it. If I’m late twice, I’m sent home. If I’m late three times, I need to find a new clinical site). It’s dark when I leave for the hospital, and dark when I come home. Not a very bright prospect for a certain student who really loves her sunlight. I thought I was going to be doing clinicals, but in fact, I think I’m in midwifery boot camp. I must have missed a memo somewhere along the way.
However, clinicals are going well. Much better than I had anticipated—in fact, most of the feedback has been very positive so far, and the preceptors I’ve encountered so far have been a lot of fun to work with. My second shift on labor and delivery involved working with one woman for most of the day. She was a multipara—first baby was 3500 gms, second baby was 4000 gms, and this one was feeling very large as well (we estimated 4000 gms), but she wasn’t diabetic, and she had a large, roomy pelvis, so we weren’t sweating (although we were watching closely, and we had a stool in the room just in case suprapubic pressure was needed in a hurry). She spent the first half of her labor out of bed and walking around (how about that! A hospital that actually has intermittent monitoring protocols that 1) work and 2) get utilized appropriately), but she wasn’t progressing quickly (about 1 cm every 2 hours), and certainly not as quickly as you would expect a multip to progress. We began to worry that if things didn’t continue to progress at a steady pace, the residents on the floor would begin to poke their heads into the room and want to start pitocin…and yes, I know! Progressing one centimeter in 2 hours is just fine, really, and not a problem if you’re at home or in a birthing center…but when you’re on labor and delivery, unfortunately there is a clock that is constantly ticking, and as a midwife on a hospital floor you have to take that into account. So we decided to rupture her membranes to see if that would help get things going. Not a benign measure, by any means, but preferable to pitocin. And sure enough, rupturing her membranes did the trick, and before we knew it, her labor was much more intense, and she was asking for an epidural, which she got.
Things slowed down a little bit after that, but she continued to make steady progress, and by 4:30 pm she was ready to push (we’d been laboring with her for the entire shift, since 8:30 am). We turned the epidural down so that she could better feel the contractions and the urge to push, and began the slow work of pushing that big baby down. Again, it took longer than we had anticipated, and she wasn’t the strongest pusher in the world, but finally, the baby began to crown. And crown. And crown. And we did, indeed, begin to sweat.
The woman had a very short perineum, and there was a little bit of scar tissue from what looked like a prior episiotomy, and her skin integrity was not that great. I gave perineal support as the head was coming out and we got the head over the perineum more or less intact. Once the head was out, my preceptor continued to apply perineal support while I worked on the shoulders. The head wasn’t rotating quickly…it definitley needed some gentle nudging to help it turn. We were concerned about a dystocia, but when I reached up I was able to feel the top of the anterior shoulder, so we knew for certain it wasn’t stuck. Nevertheless, this definitely wasn’t the type of baby that just slips out once the head is born. In fact, instead of holding the baby with both my hands gently supporting the head and neck, I actually had my hands on the shoulders, with one finger hooked under each armpit, and was gently tugging the baby out, bit by bit. I think I finally understand what is meant by “tight sholders” now. It’s not that they were stuck…but it wasn’t an easy fit.
When the baby finally came out, he looked HUGE! As it turns out, he weighed 4400 gms (not quite macrosomic)…but even so, a pretty hefty baby. Definitely took some muscle to lift him up onto his mother’s abdomen, where he proceeded to cry after about a minute of stimulation. Very adoreable baby; he looked like a 2 month old. Welcome to the world, fat and happy baby. There was terminal meconium, and when we had a chance to look at the perineum, there was a pretty nasty third degree laceration there, which baffled me since I was pretty sure the baby’s head had crowned without ripping. My preceptor told me that, given her short perineum, poor skin integrity, prior episiotomy, and just the sheer size of the kid, there was not much else we could have done to prevent it. Even so, I wonder if there was anything I could have done during the delivery of the posterior shoulder that could have prevented such a terrible tear.
In any case, the doctor came in to repair the sphincter, and we finished up the rest of the repair after that, and thus ended my 26th delivery. Tight shoulders. The largest baby I have caught to date.
