Today the smells in the hospital really got to me. I had to cover my face as I was walking down the halls and at the beginning of the shift I had to leave the main labour room to breathe. Who knows what the smells are!
When our shift started, 2 women had just delivered. One baby was under the warmer and another in a bowl at the mother's feet, dead. This mother was left alone while her placenta was still inside of her. I asked: who is delivering this woman? why is she unattended? They told me a nurse was assigned to deliver her placenta. When that nurse came, she did a manual removal of the placenta (put a hand in the uterus and peel the placenta from the uterine wall). The woman was not bleeding heavily, she was under NO analgesia what so ever. We believe that they do manual removals for all intrauterine deaths. Why do these women have to go through more pain after the loss of a child?!
They had 7 deliveries during the night shift (in 8 hours). Only 2 nurses were on with a student. How did they manage?
These last 2 weeks we were doing our shifts with mostly the same nurses. Today, we started with a new bunch. They slowly learn what we can do and what we can't (like vacuum).
Filip told us that a c-section was performed on a woman after a failed attempt at a vacuum delivery. They tried 1 hour with the vacuum (the vacuum does not have the suction power as the ones in Canada). They decided this woman needed a c-section. She got to the operating room 3 hours later. After the c-section, the woman had hypovolemic shock (an emergency condition in which severe blood and fluid loss makes the heart unable to pump enough blood to the body). Filip asked for her to get blood. She got it an hour later. She is in the intensive care unit.
Leah caught a baby today. Again, the nurses were around us and thought there was slow progress. when they took out the vacuum, the mom PUSHED that baby out before anything could have been done. At lunch, we missed a breech birth. When we arrived from into the labour room, the baby was intubated and a student was ventilating it. I had to show her the baby was breathing on its own. We saw the baby in the nursery later on. It looked abnormally pale and was being ventilated by a relative. Later we assisted at another delivery. The woman came in fully dilated and pushing. A student caught the baby. All went "normally".
Last night, we had supper with a doctor and his wife from Japan. They have come here 6 times in the last 3 years. He is an orthopedic surgeon and she teaches. He told us that he has seen 20 brachial plexus injuries (damage to the nerves in the spinal canal that run through the shoulder, arm and hand) and 3 broken femurs (big strong bone in the thigh) IN INFANTS here.
We think that I am getting eaten by bed bugs at night. We are changing the mattress today and hope all these bites on my arms and legs disappear.
Lyly
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