Birth

Yesterday was amazing.  I was privileged to watch and help with my first birth.  It was the mom’s fourth birth and fifth pregnancy; she had lost a set of twins once.  I rubbed her back and stomach while she was laboring.  Her husband had gone home before I got there to take care of the other kids and eat I think he had been up for a while.  I believe the lady’s name was Jolien.  Her mom came and brought her food and offered me some.  I am going to miss Haitian food a lot.  It’s so good.  A mom that had given birth the day before came in to get checked and to just double check that everything with her baby was alright, so Beth put me in charge of Jolein for about an hour.  I just timed the contractions and made sure she was comfterble.  Her contractions were starting to spread out again and when back to almost 6 minutes in between.  When Joanna and Beth came back in they decided to do something different with the contractions to speed up the birthing process.  The time between the contractions shortened to 2 to 1.5 minutes quite quickly.  After about a half hour of doing that at 3:05 mom was kneeling on the floor because she was tired but we didn’t want her to sit.  Joanna and Beth were talking about something important about what they had been doing (Joanna is teaching Beth and helping her through midwifery school).   I saw the head of the baby and exclaimed, “head! That’s the head , the babys coming!” I put out my hand to catch the baby in case she fell while Beth and Joanna scrambled to grab gloves.  I was not wearing gloves and they were able to get them on before I would have had to catch her so that’s good.  I quickly moved behind mom, knelt, and held her while she pushed.  I only took about a minute or so from the time I saw the head to delivery for the baby to come out.  It was all very fast and unexpected.  We thought she had a few more hours.  Beth put baby girl on mommy’s stomach and she and I worked on stimulating the baby, she wasn’t crying.  While we were doing that, Joanna worked to birth the placenta. That took about ten minutes.  The baby still was not crying and mom had not screamed once.  We worked on the baby some more until her color was right, then tied and cut it umbilical cord.  We moved mom and baby back onto the bed and quickly cleaned up the mess.  Joanna took the baby and worked on getting the amniotic fluid out of the baby’s mouth and lungs and nose.  She explained to me later that when a birth happens that fast it doesn’t give enough time for the fluid to be squeezed out of the baby and that was why she had a hard time breathing.  She got most of it cleaned out; her right nostril still had some blockage but nothing to be too worried about.  

                 

When we were done we gave the baby back to mom so she could eat.  She was very hungry.  Jolina went to go get cleaned up and go to the bathroom after a bit, so I held the baby.  The baby cried for the first time when I was holding her, she was hungry.   I gave her back to mom when she came back.  After she ate some more we washed her off and dressed her.  We drove mom and baby to the hospital for the night so they could be watched.  I went home to eat dinner and praised God for a new baby.  There might have been tears.