wingspread

Last Thursday, I had a day of Normal Prenatal (including an exam), and the following is a rough outline of what we covered: informed choice for midwifery care and home birth; confidentiality and legal issues; charting/documentation; medical abbreviations used in midwifery; creating prenatal testing checklists for our own practices; medical/surgical/gynaecological history-taking; and how to conduct the first visit with a midwifery client (a.k.a. the consult visit). Of course, we cover all these topics in various other contexts, i.e. other classes, or in general discussion, or just in the business of practising our skills or doing our homework assignments, so it's not as though we spend just one class during our entire midwifery education discussing 'legal issues', or 'charting', and never grapple with those topics again. This is, after all, what we do -- we are becoming midwives, and if there's something a midwife needs to know, she needs to know it all the time (in other words, she needs to have that knowledge accessible all of time), not just for the purposes of passing an exam (only to lose her hold on that knowledge shortly thereafter). And in that respect alone, never mind all the others, this process of acquiring the skills and knowledge of a midwife is already completely distinct from any other formal education I've had in my life.

My hands are learning what it means to be a midwife; my toes are beginning to tap to the rhythm of foetal heart tones; my brain is making neural networks that will help me make solid clinical decisions when I need to; my heart is opening to the nature of the relationship between midwife and motherbaby.

On Friday, I had an A&P class in the morning, during which I delivered my research presentation on the physiology of blood clotting (how it works and why it fails sometimes). It went smoothly; and we spent the rest of the morning reviewing meiosis, spermatogenesis, haematopoiesis, and other things ending in "sis", as it would appear...

Three hours of Normal Prenatal stretched before me on Friday afternoon, which passed quickly and painlessly (indeed, happily) in discussion about routine initial prenatal testing, performing urinalysis, antibody screening, and various other aspects of diagnostic testing during pregnancy. All the while, I feel my grasp on things becoming more secure, my ease with the jargon (and better still -- my ease with that jargon's real application to real situations) growing slowly and steadily. It's a wonderful feeling, and keeps back whatever doubts fleetingly appear about how I'm ever going to cope as an actual, bona fide midwife.

Later on Friday afternoon, we practised venipuncture on each other for a half-hour and I was hurt by a sister-student with admirable determination but hands made shaky by adrenaline. I shrugged it off, because that's part of the dance, and we're learning the steps. Nonetheless, the structural integrity of my median vein was compromised, and I tenderly nursed a blue-black puncture wound for the weekend that followed.

Shortly after the Needle Incident, I grabbed my weekend bag and my guitar and hitched an hour-long ride to Portland, made far shorter by sweet chatting and hearty guffawing with my friend C. In the evening, I had a delightful walk through the city in the crisp air (who needs a car, anyway?) and, having worked up an appetite, I ate pork confit and Tuscan beans with kale and pancetta for dinner. The only thing that could conceivably accompany such a fantastic meal was a woody, violet Sicilian merlot. Yikes, so damn bourgeois...

Saturday - finally, Indian Summer! There was a rare and breathtaking wave of warmth over chilly southern Maine. Breakfast was buckwheat pancakes with raspberries and maple syrup, after which I rustily strummed my guitar for a bit. In the afternoon, a trip to Bradbury Mountain State Park, near Freeport, was in order. Once there, I ascended the incline at a leisurely pace through damp and mushroomy woods to a flattened rock balcony, from which I could see all the way back to Portland through an almost uninterrupted forest of extraordinary Fall foliage.

Sunday brought more exquisite, short-sleeved weather and a glorious breakfast at Portland's legendary Good Egg café, and yes -- they do make good eggs. And good oatmeal-molasses toast. In the afternoon, all I wanted to do was run and make merry and pet other people's dogs and smile at babies and walk and play along the shore at Old Orchard Beach. On Monday morning, the sea smell lingered on my skin.

On Monday, our classes for Physical Assessment began, and we launched right into taking blood pressure readings, and listening to heart/lung sounds, and palpating each other's abdomens, and asking our teacher (a naturopathic physician) a million questions about why we couldn't get the opthalmoscope to light up properly, or whether this 'lump' we felt on a friend's back was normal, or why the thyroid gland took the shape of a butterfly under our fingers. Can you tell how thrilled I am to be doing hands-on stuff at last?! I'm grinning.

Tuesday and yesterday were spent getting through my rather ridiculously overwhelming load of homework. I took a long run through the Back Cove yesterday evening (although the irrational but crime-hardened South African girl in me was shrieking inwardly, "How can I be outside, in the dark, running through thick trees, at this hour?"). Dinner (Thai red curry) was cooked on a runner's high. Sweet.

Today brought more Normal Prenatal, with a lesson on how to find and count foetal heart tones, among many other wonderful things. It's a quiet evening in Bridgton, and I'm about to settle down to study for an A&P exam tomorrow morning. Feeling good.