Reflecting on second year

Ahh...the summer.  The breeze, the warmth, the kicking and screaming children.  I had almost forgotten this part of life existed!  

Normal Childbearing is done - all 16 weeks, assignments, and exams.  We're done!  I am officially halfway through the program - although, given how much of a challenge the program was and knowing the rest of school is placements - I kind of still feel like I just finished the introduction.

I fully intended to have a new blog post out the second I finished placement.  But just before I finished placement, I had a string of 8 days where I went to ....oh gosh... I cant even remember now, something like 10 births?!  Needless to say, once I finished my last day of placement (and some very interesting detours getting home thanks to my GPS), I fell into recovery mode, and 3-4 weeks later I'm starting to get my head back on straight. That being said, I'm out of midwife mode for the next little while and totally forget what questions most people have been dying to know about the placement, even though I know there are many.  So please dont hesitate to ask away!  

There is so much to share about what these last four months have been like for my classmates and I.  All of us have had such diverse experiences from one another, though, that I can only really speak for my own experience.    I'll probably make a number of posts over the summer in little bits and pieces.  I'm also planning to post a couple of the papers I wrote, as they're in pretty understandable language and I think they're pretty darn interesting (I try not to write a paper about boring things, generally).

For today's post, I wanted to follow up on where my learning is at now, compared to where it was when I was only two weeks into my first midwifery placement.  At that point, I was already being directly involved in all aspects of almost all clients care, from prenatal visits, to birth and postpartum visits.  I felt awkward, didn't know what to say often, fumbled, made lots of mistakes. I also was undergoing a humongous adjustment to the midwifery lifestyle.  The scale of change for me was so big - easily as big of a change in life as the birth of my first child.  And for anyone who's got kids, you might imagine that means every aspect of your entire life is different.  My family had a major adjustment to go through as well, especially my partner, who had to give up a great deal of his work and identity to be only Dad.  For a man as passionate about his music as I am about midwifery, this was a huge challenge for him.  Musicians often get gigs at night. (no childcare) Midwives often go to births at night. (no way to predict which night)  You get the picture.

Amazingly, when you do it every single day, you start to get better at things quickly. We managed to figure out how to get through it at home with a lot of practice.  As for teh clinic, because I was the only student at the practice I was placed in, I had an open door to participate in basically anything and everything that I wanted to.  This meant that the only births I missed out of all that occurred in a practice of 6 midwives were the ones that happened on my days off (or when I was already at one).  In this way, being placed at a rural practice was a huge advantage.  While many of the students who were placed in busy Toronto practices were struggling to meet their minimums for birth numbers (18), I was grappling with the idea soon before the end of my placement that I was going to surpass the maximum (30) - - - which I did.  This meant tremendous learning for me.  All of these experiences meant that by my last two weeks of placement (two of the busiest and funnest of the whole term), I was *doing* almost all of what I had been timidly watching my preceptors do in the beginning: leading clinic discussions (oftentimes by myself with no other midwife in the room for the first part of the appointment); responding directly to client pages about pregnancy, labour, and postpartum concerns; doing all labour and immediate postpartum assessments and procedures within the scope of midwifery care including catching the baby (hopefully with minimal assistance from our preceptors)....the list could go on for 10 pages (it does in our course outline, actually).  

Everything that we are learning and capable of handling with minimal assistance is within the scope of Normal Childbearing - normal, common, or variations of normal.  Obviously, though, we can't always predict when that'll be, so most of us were exposed to a hearty share of not-so-normal situations as well.  I mentioned in my last post that my faith in the process had gotten seriously put to the test in my first few weeks of placement after a string of situations that I had never viewed from the care providers perspective before.  Thank goodness (for myself and my future clients!) that faith got restored with many, many positive, straightforward beautiful strong women and their births to show me that birth is a normal life event.  

Of course, the focus of our later courses will be on managing and consulting for some of the various complications that came up over the course of our learning.  By the end of the term, I found myself REALLY curious about those complications.  This, to me, is a sign that I'm comfortable with the "normal" stuff.  

Seriously, I feel like I've said absolutely nothing.  But there's so much more to say!  Since I got into recovery mode, my writing hasn't been as strong as usual!  Please post unanswered questions in the comments.  I just might make another post about it!