APGAR

Well I had another baby. Not me personally :) but I was there in the thick of it with my catchers mitt on. We got dispatched to an imminent delivery (yeah right, here we go - they are almost never "imminent") at about 10 am and we arrived to find mum bearing down hard and dad looking worried. All thoughts of scooping up mum and making a dash for the hospital evaporated when I could see the baby's head beginning to crown. I'm thinking; oh crap I'm not ready for this! I thought briefly about asking mum if she'd mind hanging on for a few minutes while I got my head organised, but no, this was happening right now. I put on my gloves and my bravest face and leaped into the fray.

Well I'll spare you the detail - but about 4 minutes later we had a healthy little girl who very soon began to scream her lungs out - the single greatest sound you can have when you are delivering kids. Its magic! Mum was fantastic and was really clear about how she wanted things done - dad was still looking worried and I tried reassuring him that both of his girls were in good shape. ABC's were good. We then performed the APGAR assessment at one minute and scored her at 8. Excellent. My partner got the truck organised and the five of us were soon on our way to hospital. Apparently they had been caught out with a labour that progressed a lot more rapidly than expected. As we made our way to hospital, mum looked tired, dad still looked worried (I'm thinking that may have been his default expression) and me? I was grinning like an idiot for the rest of the day.


PS I really thought "leapt" was a word but my blog spell checker wants me to use "leaped". Oh well.

Ho Ho Ho

I worked on Christmas day and instead of kids falling off new bikes, nanna falling sideways despite being propped up at the head of the table and lots of lower 'chest' pain (ate too much) like last year - it seems that what most people got for Christmas was gastro. Everybody was calling in with N and V, V and D, N and D, or just D++++.

The Royal Melbourne hospital has been on gastro alert for more than a week with monitors wearing flouro vests guarding the hallway making sure nobody gets in or out (without washing their hands). Its been a big pain in the backside, with certain sections of the ED cordoned off and crews having to put on the extra protective gowns and gloves just to offload a patient. Merry bloody Christmas..mutter mutter...

I think I may have had gastro for about 2 hours on boxing day, but then again it may have been some dodgy prawns from the night before. Either way I did my best to humanely drown those poor little gastro bugs in a cocktail of local and imported beer. Iron guts 1. Bugs 0.

Anyway, a happy new year to all!