Meriel's Birth Part I

Meriel was due at the end of my second month of family medicine residency. I planned to finish my pediatrics rotation, which finished a few days before her due date, then start my maternity leave. Since Eris was born on her due date, I figured my second would be pretty close. I had sort of packed a bag, made arrangements for someone to watch Eris in case the baby arrived before my mom did, and that was the extent of it. I was really busy with residency.

As part of residency, I was on-call in the hospital every sixth night. Since I was a new physician, an upper level resident stayed with me to help me out. I had started my Thursday in the pediatric ward at 7am, was to work at the hospital overnight, and be finished by noon on Friday. I was looking forward to the weekend off. At the start of my night call, Joseph the third year scheduled to be with me, told me I better not go into to labor. He was half joking; he really did not want to be responsible for an intern's job that night. I assured him that I didn't have any plans to do so, after all I was only 38 weeks.

A few hours into the busy evening, I felt a few contractions. I really didn't have time to pay attention to them, as I hurried from the ER to radiology to confer with a radiologist over an x-ray, then upstairs to check on a critical patient, back to the ER to determine whether a patient needed to be admitted, and so on. I kept feeling minor contractions, but just thought, "I've been on my feet since 7am, once I get a chance to sit down, they'll go away." Besides, they weren't anything like the contractions I had with Eris, so I thought it was probably false labor. Every time I neared the end of a particular task and thought I was just about to have a chance to rest, I received another page and had to start in on something new.

I was admitted a patient on the second floor, when I decided that I was really in labor. I told Joseph, and he chuckled; he thought I was joking. He went off to check on another patient. I called Philip and let him know I thought he should call Christy to watch Eris and asked him to call the midwife. Then I quickly tried to finish up all the paperwork required for admitting a patient to the hospital, writing all the orders, writing a brief note in the chart, confirming certain orders with the nurses and asking them if there was anything else I should address. I was about to dictate my History and Physical (H&P), the official document of all the information I had collected relevant to this particular medical case. All of a sudden, I realized that I was not going to be able to dictate coherently; the contractions were becoming too strong and close together. The nurse taking care of the patient was sitting next to me; I asked her to please tell Joseph that I had gone down to Labor Room and that I had not dictated the H&P.

I stood up to walk downstairs but had to sit again to ride through a contraction. My water broke!