I worked postpartum for many years before I worked on – I’m an RN – I worked postpartum for many years before I started doing actual labor and delivery. This was one time when I was working postpartum and a mom came in like having cramps and she was, you know, I think she’s probably 22 weeks, 24 weeks maybe, and so I admitted her and she was cramping pretty badly and I looked, I was going to do an exam so I looked, you know, at her perineum and here was a little tiny baby leg coming out and it was the most, I was just so, so, so, so sad, you know. And she didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t want to say so I, you know, I comforted her and said, yes, you’re bleeding and I will be contacting your doctor. Your doctor’s already on the way and he’ll be in a few minutes. And so I just made her comfortable and luckily the doctor got there pretty quickly and she was, I think she probably suspected this was happening anyway. But it was such a, it was really a tough one for me to see this little leg, you know. She was miscarrying, you know, she’s having a miscarriage, she’s losing her baby, she’s losing this little tiny baby, so yeah, so then the doctor came in and he was able to tell her that. I had already gotten a little new wrap up. We have little packages that have the blanket and they’re made for miscarriage just like that.
So you were working in postpartum though? Why was she in postpartum?
Um, yeah, it’s interesting. Probably there was not a labor room open. Yeah, I don’t remember.
How far along was she?
I think 22 to 24 weeks. Probably something like that. So the doctor helped evacuate this little baby and this, it was so tiny, you know, of course, and put it in this nice warm blanket. That’s the thing that we do, you know when someone’s losing a baby that early. It wasn’t so much a thing, but it was for me, that that mom could have contact with that little – that baby was enough that you could see that it wasn’t like the fetal tissue – it was actually formed. So it was really hard. It was really, really hard for her. Yeah, and hard for me too. I think we were all crying. Yeah, things like that were hard and that was she was in a postpartum room but I’ve had other instances.
Like I remember this mother having a stillborn and she had to go through the whole labor process, like helping her through that, and just knowing that her baby had already died. Those things happened. That’s what happens in life. And that baby was, I don’t know, 39 weeks, totally towards the end of the pregnancy, and so that was so hard. And the family was so wonderful and beautiful and the baby was beautiful, really. Then I remember her coming back just over a year later having a baby. I was not her labor nurse at that time but I knew who she was and she had a baby that was alive and good. You know, stories of life and death and birth and I cry thinking about it right now a little.
Did you have training in school about how to care for a patient who is giving birth to a stillborn baby?
No we didn’t really have training during my training as a nurse, no. Rotations are pretty short and you didn’t always get to see a birth even if you had three months to learn this whole story of birth. I remember, though, this one time because it was at a hospital in downtown Seattle, and I just happened to be at a birth – a delivery. I don’t think I was in the room when this baby was born, so I’m not sure exactly what I was doing that day, but the baby, who was a stillborn, was put into the back room where the sinks are, and it just seems so wrong. I just could hardly stand that. I was just like a 19 year old or something, but I remember that baby laying there, just on a blanket – it was kind of wrapped up – but it was a stillborn baby.
So the beginning of learning to be more cognizant of the parents and what a new mother would need, and when it’s a loss especially, became more of a teaching. It was something that needed to be handled better than it had been in the past, when a baby would just die and then be whisked away or something and you never got to see the baby. That was changing. And different people had different abilities to be able to do that. Like, I know that I was more comfortable with midwife births than a lot of nurses were and I was more comfortable with a stillborn person coming in – I mean a patient that was gonna be having a questionable delivery – than some other nurses were. Yeah, I think it’s really important that they were able to see the baby for sure, and hold them if they are comfortable with it, and just assess the situation.
So hard.
Yeah.