Midwifery is catching

I got tagged for this one (kachink! It’s in my right ear ) by Mama Mid(Wife) Madness so here I am telling you, fellow reader, why I blog.

1. I blog because I want to hear what I have to say (and I figure with time others will want to too?)
Lots of people blog to inform, to rant, to share, to be anonymous, to be widely known. I do it because I can, and because I think it will be fascinating to look back on my blogging in years to come and see where I end up and how I get there. I also find that something burbles around in my brain for a week before I sit down and pen a few paragraphs that covers what is bothering me. GBS testing? C-sections?

I also want to contribute as much as I can to the blogosphere that I read avidly. See my links on the right here? I read all of them. How dare I think I can read all of those if I don’t want to share? Some people accuse me of oversharing and possibly needing to pull in my horns, especially about uni, but I want to hear what I’ve got to say. Possibly because otherwise I will forget the good things as much as the bad things. 

2. I blog because it’s a lonely road, and it’s cheaper than a psych
It is now week 7 at uni and my timetable now has me at uni just one day a week, and even then I only share one lecture with my fellow B.Midders. My first placement will be in Port Augusta, which is 300km away. I study and write and learn on my own as I’m in one subject externally. It’s therefore a very lonely road I tread at the moment and I have to babble at someone and it may as well be you, dear reader.

I also blog because I want to learn how to write honestly now, before I get into the life and death stuff. At the moment it’s all theory. I’ve done one blood pressure on one real live person, and she was a volunteer. That’s it. So I need to be able/willing to share that now so when the Hard Stuff comes up, I can do that too. Because if I internalise everything I will go. insane. Well, more insane. 

And for the record - I have 3 blogs and run a fourth. So it’s addictive. Cheaper than a psych though! 

3. I blog because I learn that way
If I write something, I learn it well. So I learn by writing and I write by learning about things.

4. Along the same lines - I want to educate the world about the whole shebang
There’s a lot of bad press out there about pregnancy and birth and similarly about uneducated, heathen, ignorant, unwashed midwives who can’t possibly know as much about birth as doctors or obstetricians. Women are terrified of pregnancy and birth and to me that is the saddest thing - that such a normal and beautiful aspect of life is cloaked in terror and so women place the most amazing amount of trust in "experts" because they don’t know any better.

I want more women to be empowered about birth, and if that starts with scouring the internet for blogs about birth and pregnancy and not necessarily from the pregnant woman’s perspective (cause really, you rarely find "good" experiences blogged with abandon!), then I want to be in that. I want women to know they have the right to say no, and mean it. I want women to know that they have the right to respect of their wishes, to require people to honour them and their birth, and that possibly the most important moment of their lives isn’t supposed to be anything other than a warm, lovely experience. I want women to know that as midwives, we are trained to view one-on-one continuous care with a woman through her pregnancy and possibly pregnancies is HER RIGHT and the absolute minimum that should be given, rather than the model of care where she sees a different person each time, or where a simple test outside of a band of "norm" means she becomes "high risk" and therefore unable to access midwifery-led care.

5. I blog because I’m opinionated
I am, and I know it. I have opinions about my course, about midwifery, about birth and about the world. Goodness knows what will happen when the election is called here this year. I want to share them and have debates and point to other people’s opinions and try to narrow down why I agree, or don’t. Some of my opinions are a little hotter than others and I am aware of that but should I be scared of what people think of my opinions? I don’t write anything here that I wouldn’t say in person for real…

No idea who to tag!  How about Meconium Happens, The Other Side of the World, and Milliner’s Dream although I’m not sure they even know I exist .

Sometime ago I said something insightful about stuff, so I’m updating it:

"In other news, you can see from my lovely shiny ticker that I am off on my placement is a month and a bit. I have a few things I need to get done still:

• shirts x2
• pants x2
• bra
• immunisations
• police check
• senior first aid certificate
• shoes x1 black (working on that! Not as urgent though)
  
• badge
• portfolio arranged

My placement may be… dun dun DAH… is in Port Augusta!"

And I now have 3 follow-throughs, which I won’t be divulging huge amounts of information about on here due to privacy reasons. But I can say that I am thrilled that people are taking me up on my offer!

Well maybe not at the *end* of the tunnel but somewhere on the tunnel itself is a skylight. I’ve just spent two days at uni learning nursing skills, which are crucial to my practice and learning!! The skills I learnt were fun and funky all in one - temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiration, interview skills, manual handling (which I found far too amusing when I volunteered to be turned over) and hand washing. It was nice to finally get through to the lecturers that the constant references to "NURSES" was what got up collectively the BMID students noses, rather than the course itself.

And to top the day off, today I separately got not 1, but TWO new shiny follow throughs. That means that I have 2 women already! One is 26 weeks and the other is due in early July. Oh bugger, that means both are the same time (distance?) along! Oonohz! Anyway, one is L and the other is J, and it’s very exciting to have people who say yes to me.

In other news, you can see from my lovely shiny ticker that I am off on my placement is a month and a bit. I have a few things I need to get done still:

• shirts x2
• pants x2
• bra
• immunisations
• police check
• senior first aid certificate
• shoes x1 black
• badge
• portfolio arranged

My placement may be… dun dun DAH… in Port Augusta! Yep, ME, traipsing 3 hours away for a placement. I am excited and terrified at the same time, as it’s away from home for two weeks and in a town I’ve never been to doing stuff I’ve not yet learned how to do (respirations on a baby, I’m looking at you!). And yet I’m excited because I’ll get my hands *mwahahahahahaha* on bumps and babies.

Immunisation is an interesting topic. On one hand, it is handed out as a sure-fire way to avoid a list of diseases from A-Z and on the other there is a plethora of information sites on refusing to vaccinate. My personal opinion here is that immunisations have not been shown to be dangerous (as opposed to being shown that they’re safe) and confer benefits on the individual as well as the whole population through herd immunity (which is different from herb immunity which I just typed twice! ). That said, immunisation is not a 100% preventative for any disease, and there are risks of immunisation, such as that if you never catch wild-type chickenpox you risk getting a very nasty case of shingles as an adult.

For my placement in just 6 weeks, I am supposed to have had a long list of immunisations, as well as having had a police check, renewed my first aid certificate and bought a uniform. I guess that list is revealing of where I stand on it - getting my immunisations up to date and updated because I want to go to Malaysia in a few years is just like ordering my uniform and getting the police to state that I’ve not so far been a danger to society.  

So what happens when a healthcare worker is refused employment or a placement because of lack of immunisation? Is it a violation of their rights? Is it reasonable for Houses of Sick to refuse to allow its workers to be possibly hurt by someone in there with a strain of something? Is it reasonable to say that hospitals want to minimise the number of people possibly affected by or participating in an outbreak of something by insisting that the people they employ are immunised? Is it ridiculous to do so because you are requiring people to do something to their bodies and universal precautions in theory should prevent this kind of transmission? Is it discrimination to refuse to employ someone because they are not immunised, even if the lack of immunisation is on the grounds of conscientious objection, religion, or allergy to the vector (some are made in eggs)?

I know in the past that for placements some people have signed forms stating they are conscientious objectors to immunisation and so they are allowed to participate but this door is slowly closing, regardless of how much the words "should be immunised" are bandied around in the forms that I see about placements and employment. I also know of one midwife who did not immunise and completed her degree but is now unable to be employed!

Would you want to be treated by a nurse or assisted by a midwife that isn’t immunised? Do you assume health care workers are immunised? Does it come under "first do no harm" to patients… or should it be "first do no harm to yourself"? Can you be a carrier of something even if you’re immunised? If you aren’t immunised, how do you feel about this? I am so, it’s a moot point what I think about doing so or not (I felt that the risks of being immunised were much smaller than the risks of getting ill, or of passing on something nasty to newborns) but I am also doing homeopathic support for myself having had a large number of shots recently.

I am outing myself as an old schooler there by thinking in terms of terms and semesters still - my school has only just this year changed to having 144 study periods (I kid you not) and this semester is study period 2, and next semester is study period 5… just to confuse people. Anyway, this is week 5 of term one of twelve, and I have a new ticker to celebrate:

Yeaaaahhhhh, that makes me feel just thrilled . Ok how about another one for my first placement:

That’s better! I have volunteered to be placed in a rural hospital, so I may end up in the Spencer Gulf area though I’ve also said that Woollongong would be nice and convenient to Sydney/Canberra for visits. I have volunteered to do that for a number of reasons, the main ones being that I think a rural placement would be fascinating, and also because it may mean that a local student who is unable/unwilling to fit into a rural placement because of lack of transport, family duties, job commitments or a dislike of going outside of Adelaide has a better chance of getting a placement with the group midwifery practice. That said though, given the model of the gmp, I can see that many of the students who don’t have transport, or are the main caregiver of children, may really struggle with that model of midwifery care. The alternative model of set rotating shifts has definite benefits for the midwifery-student it seems!

Last week I had my first practical class and I am of two minds about it. On one hand, I can see that what we learnt will be of great help to us, as our first placement will be kind of hard/pointless if we can’t take a BP, know what a vaginal examine kind of vaguely entails, and at least have seen someone palpate.

But - and it’s probably a small but - my group had a mixture of nurses and mature-age students (erm yes, including me!) and fresh-out-of-highschool students. The first group took over and showed everyone their skills without going slowly enough for the others to follow (especially the more shy/timid ones), and some of the latter were really and utterly wigged out by the fake pelvises. Many had never been faced with sharps for eg and were all over the morphine saline injection station while three of us wielded syringes. Even though the lab rules clearly state closed-toe shoes, someone had thongs on and narrowly avoided having a syringe dropped in/on their toe, and yet still managed to remain pissed that I’d asked her to step away from the three of us lest someone get hurt.

It was a small but, and really, the whole two day experience was fantastic in terms of getting one step closer to being with women. It was so intersting to meet some of the external students who have come from all over the country to study this course. It was amazing to see our lecturer’s eyes lit up when she spoke of birth and women and pregnancy.  

A comment on my blog recently said lots of things but one thing stuck in my mind, even amid the car accident aftermath and such. That post was born mostly from feeling completely and utterly ungrounded by and from everything at the time, and my really questioning what was driving me in this direction. I don’t want my course to become a means to an end and yet already it is partly feeling like that - if not because many people assume that I am doing nursing first, then because of downright reluctance from older nurses that I have had interactions with to accept direct-entry midwives, and other people questioning my drive for doing this (misplaced baby lust apparently!).

And let me hasten to add that in the end, I loved working with my group, I did them proud, and we are a lot closer for it! 

"My other tip is this: don’t worry yet about what kind of midwife you want to be. Trust me when I say that you don’t have enough knowledge yet to know this. Your heart will lead that quest in time. Focus for the time being on the work in front of you. It’s important and will help shape that midwife you will become. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, don’t over schedule yourself (I do this too), and read things which remind you in the best, positive way, of your calling.

So I did. I got a few books to inspire me in the best positive way I can. I made contact with people who will keep me grounded. I have made peace with the fact that many of the people in my course will probably end up being medwives because they are not inspired to be anything more - and that that’s something I have to be ok with. Just like they’re going to have to be ok with me pursuing evidence based care about strep B testing, glucose challenge testing, physiological third stage, breast is best, ultrasound, weighing during pregnancy and a heap of other things!