A baby is born

Have I mentioned how much I love what I’m doing? Today was the best day ever. I got to my practicum and the doctor said “today we’re doing a C-section”. I could barely wait until 11:00. We walked onto the ward and the nurses were standing there, and one of the surgeons and the anesthetist. The surgeon shook hands with me, and I could see a smile under his half-tied surgical mask.
“Well, we can always use another assistant.” He said.
I went into the change room with my doctor and we stripped out of our clothes and put on green scrubs. I was too embarrassed to let her see me taking my own pulse, but I’m sure it was racing with excitement. We went into the hallway and shook hands with the Mom and Dad and talked with them for a minute. When the anesthetist called them into the operating room, we went to the big stainless steel sinks and scrubbed up to our elbows with chlorhexidine. I put on a hair cover, shoe covers and a mask and then we went into the operating room, opening the door with our shoulders. The OR nurses were waiting and I stood there arms outstretched while they put a gown on me and tied it, then slipped sterile gloves onto my hands.
“Don’t touch anything.” The doctor warned me, “Now that you’re sterile.”
We stood to the side and watched while a nurse swabbed the mother’s back as she sat on the operating table. The anesthetist was chatty and he had a student with him as well and he explained the procedure as he injected a local anesthetic and then prepared to give her an epidural. I watched the needle go in. I have a strong stomach for bloody things, but there’s something a little funny about seeing a 5 inch needle go into someone’s spine.
Then she was being laid down, a drape put up, the anesthetist testing her level of paresthesia, and the nurses catheterizing her and setting up the sterile field. They wiped the mother’s whole abdomen with dark orange iodine and then draped her with a large blue plastic with a whole in the middle that neatly exposed the surgical area.
“Stand there.” The nurse ordered me and I took my place next to the woman’s abdomen.
“Scalpel.” The surgeon said and the nurse passed him a shiny blade.
“Pick-ups.” She passed him a pair of tweezers. (I’ve been told that if I ever call them tweezers in surgery, they’ll ask me to leave.) In the background I could hear the anesthetist student being pimped by her supervisor, and I held my breath in anticipation of the dreaded questions.
But the surgeon was funny and engaging and my doctor next to me explained everything as we went along.
“This scar here is from her previous caesarean section.”
I used a sponge to soak up blood and the surgeon used a cauterizing gun to touch the ends of nicked blood vessels. Through my mask I could smell the unmistakable odor of burnt flesh and in the background I could hear the nurses counting off the instruments that went in and came out of the woman’s abdomen.
The surgeon cut through layers of flesh, carefully peeling back the layers of skin, fat and muscle.
“Put your hand here.” He ordered me and I put my hand into the woman’s abdomen.
“You can feel the baby’s head through the uterus.”
I felt the head, small and firm beneath my hand.
He cut into uterus, my doctor holding it away from the baby with pickups while amniotic fluid gushed out and poured down the sides of the drape into a waiting pouch. When the incision was big enough he reached his hand inside and began to deliver the baby out. I was holding my breath and the father was staring over the drape as the baby emerged, cradled in the surgeon’s hands. The baby was gray and covered in slime but suddenly he opened his mouth and began to squall loudly, and his skin gradually turned pink.
“Look at him!” the surgeon held the baby high so the mom could see.
“Scissors.” My doctor asked and she clamped the umbilical cord, cutting it off before handing the baby to the nurses and a pediatrician standing by. I could feel tears in the corners of my eyes. It was a magical, special moment.
“Now we deliver the placenta.” The surgeon said to me. “The nurse just gave her some oxytocin to cause the uterus to contract”…..
My attention was snapped back to the bloody mess in front of us. He talked to me and asked the odd question while he delivered the placenta and I sopped up blood and used clamps to hold her flesh back.
“Sutures.”
The nurse passed pick-ups holding a slender curved needle and long black thread and he began to stitch together the layers of her uterus, one by one, pulling the thread up in between while I dabbed with sponges and slid a retractor along her bladder to keep it out of the way. It took longer to stitch the woman up than it did to cut her open, and in the process I got splattered in blood. (Which is a whole lot better than being splattered with any kind of fluid from Nellie, if you care to know.)
When she was stitched up neatly, the doctor used a stapler to close the final layer of skin and then we swabbed up most of the blood and stepped back. The Dad was cradling his son in his arms near the mom’s head and we shrugged out of our splattered gowns and gloves and went to her. My doctor leaned over to hug the mom and I told her thank you for letting me be there and touched the little baby while he looked up at me with blinking black eyes.
“The baby is tongue-tied.” The pediatrician explained in a low voice to the doctor. “I’ll leave that in your hands.”
“Yes, it’s no problem.” The doctor assured him. (Tongue-tied is when the tongue is attached to the base of the mouth, and it is a simple procedure to loosen it that can be done in the doctor’s office.)
I was still breathless with excitement when we went out of the OR and stripped off our clothes and washed our hands. We dressed and the doctor and I went out of the hospital to rush back to her office to see an afternoon full of patients. Outside it had just stopped raining and the air was sharp and cool.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” The doctor said to me. “God made it stop raining just for the two of us today.”
She laughed and I couldn’t keep the happy smile off my face. And even giving injections to screaming babies and watching rectal exams all afternoon didn’t take away that good feeling.