Since I am not immediately on call at the moment, I have been guiltlessly enjoying lots of late night reading. The book I just finished is Lady's Hands, Lion's Heart, which was written by Carol Leonard. It is a midwifery memoir, my most favorite book genre. I had such a hard time putting this book down so I could actually get some sleep. Each birth story was so fascinating to me, both for the social story part of it and the clinical midwifery information.
The author starts with the story of her son's birth, which made me stressed just reading about it. She shows up at the hospital in hard labor, half an hour shy of midnight. She doesn't have insurance and the hospital staff tell her if she is admitted before midnight, she will be charged for an entire day. She decides to labor in the waiting room, and by the time it's midnight and she is finally admitted, she is already 8 centimeters dilated. She is then shaved, given an enema, and strapped down to the table. When her baby's head is crowning and she reaches down to feel, the doctor slaps her hand away and yells at her for contaminating his sterile field. He gives her a huge episiotomy, the baby is born, and she has to shout at the hospital staff to give him to her. After the doctor calls her a "breeder" and puts in a "husband's stitch" while he sutures her, she gets up, grabs the baby, and walks out of the hospital AMA. It is 1975.
Over the next few years, she sort of falls into midwifery by accident. She starts accompanying an old country doctor as he attends home birth throughout rural New Hampshire. She begins working at a women's health center, where she is trained in all kind of gynecological skills. She eventually starts attending births by herself, still not quite believing she is a midwife. When she starts getting hassled by some unfriendly doctors who are actually jealous of her success, she becomes more political and is eventually instrumental in working to achieve legal status for independent midwifery in New Hampshire.
I love reading the birth stories. I love that I understand everything she writes. I especially love that I can experience the birth emergencies through her writing, without actually having to live them myself!
A few stories really stood out to me and one is about a doctor she grows to have a mutual, professionally respectful relationship with. He has been trained by midwives, and as a result, he is un-threatened by her work and is especially open to incorporating midwifery techniques in the hospital. One day she asks him why he's so different from his colleagues. This is his response: "Oh, it goes back to those Jamaican midwives in my residency, I guess. They were set on humbling me, mostly because they could. I want to think it was because they liked me. They used to make me do the nurses' work. One day they said they wanted to teach me what it was like to be a woman patient. They told me to go into the exam room and remove my pants and get up on the exam table with my feet in the stirrups. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, although it was probably twenty minutes or so. Then a beautiful female medical student came in, nodded to me briefly, snapped on a latex glove, and did a cursory rectal exam. Then she said something unintelligible to me, distractedly patted my knee, and walked out of the room. I lay there staring at the ceiling, my face burning with embarrassment. Then I could hear all the laughing outside in the hall. They were right, those crazy women. It was a lesson I will never forget."
I love it!
She describes her assistant as "someone who also is possessed enough to lose nights and nights of sleep, occasionally be scared sh**less for no money and even less recognition, have no reliable social life, and be scorned and dismissed by the medical community, all for the sheer love of it."
That's me! I love reading midwifery memoirs. I end up feeling so validated by the end of the book. I'm not the only one! I'm not the only one!
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