Expectations, Traditions, and First Impressions

Not 5 minutes before, one of the attendings had just finished telling me that births here in Ecuador aren't so different than births in the US...  that's when it all started.  An Ashuar Indian woman had come in earlier in the day to deliver her 6th baby.  The patients who come in from the jungle have various traditions they carry out as part of the birth process.  For example, the mother or mother-in-law puts a lot of pressure on the top of the belly to try to force the baby to come down quicker.  Or another tradition, they send the laboring woman further out into the jungle where she digs a hole to fill with leaves and squats down over it to birth her baby there.  When the placenta is delivered, it is then buried in the hole as a marker of the birth place of the baby.  

Well, we certainly hadn't dug a hole or covered the ground in leaves, but there I was in the delivery room with my patient on her knees on the floor, her mother-in-law in the "heimlich maneuver" type position trying to push the baby out.  I tried (to no avail) to get the nurse to put the patient back in the bed and prepare the bed for the birth-- "wait," she said.  But I knew that being her 6th, we had no time to wait... and sure enough, within a few minutes the nurse was yelling, "the baby's coming out."  

So there I found myself, squatting on the floor in a pool of blood and amniotic fluid, with my head pressed against this poor woman's soon-to-be-unpregnant belly so I could catch the little one before his head met the cold tile floor.  I somehow delivered him just a few inches from the ground, quickly unwrapped the umbilical cord that was coiled twice around his neck...And the very strange experience ended with a precious life, crying in my arms, one leg of my scrub pants soaked in blood, a proud mommy finally ready to get in the bed to rest.  Welcome to the world, little guy!