Dancing Not Drowning

As I rode my bike into work, sweat ran down my back and I couldn’t believe how hot it was at 6:20 in the morning. When I arrived at the hospital guesthouse and looked at the thermometer, it was already 96 degrees. It was going to be a hot day. 

I started my day off with a hot cup of coffee anyway. Even though it’s stupid hot, I think drinking a hot drink somehow equalizes my interior and exterior temperatures. 

I sat down beside the obstetrician, who is a beautiful woman of 70 years that has a contagious spunk and energy. I love working with her, and I so want to be like her when I’m her age. I told her that I was praying for a good day with lots of deliveries and no sick babies. 

The day started out calm. I was working alone in the maternity with my one laboring patient, my four postpartum patients, and my two premature babies in incubators who liked to quit breathing when I wasn’t looking. All morning I gave feedings, antibiotics, checked funduses and fetal heart tones, and bagged babies to wake them up from their apnea - dancing between them with the grace that I had prayed for. 

Until another laboring woman showed up. Then a third. And a fourth. Bleeding down her legs. 

Just when things were becoming more than I could handle by myself and I felt more like a floundering fish than a graceful dancer, I was about to call for help when another nurse appeared and offered her service. I think God sent her in the nick of time. A few hours later, after an emergency cesarean section, everything kind of got back under control. It was almost 7:00 pm and I couldn’t wait to give report and get out of that crazy place. 

At 7:00 pm sharp, just when I finished passing meds and charting my entire day, one of my laboring patients starting seizing. 

She had been laboring peacefully and normally all day without one single problem or elevated blood pressure. She had nothing in her prenatal records to indicate a risk for eclampsia. She had reached ten centimeters just about ten minutes before and I had pushed with her a little bit, but the baby was still high and it was her first pregnancy, so I was letting her “labor down.” 

One blood pressure of 152/93 was all it took to send her into crisis. She had four seizures in the time it took us to get her prepped for an emergency cesarean. 

So instead of passing report to the oncoming nurses, I ended up running down the down the hall to the operating room, pushing my patient on a stretcher while slowly pushing 4 grams of magnesium into the IV in her arm. 

Two and half hours later, once she was in recovery and her healthy baby in the arms of her loving family members, I walked back to the hospital guest house with the obstetrician, and she told me, “Don’t you ever pray for lots of deliveries in one day ever again!” We laughed and praised God together for the strength he gave us to work so long, hard, and incessantly, and for the best outcomes possible in each situation we encountered that day

In that one day, we had three complicated deliveries for placenta previa, fetal demise, and eclampsia. Not to mention that we had treated and managed neonatal hyperbilirubinemia, malaria, and multiple apneic episodes in preterm babies. All in a good day’s work. 

Talk about one day, let me tell you what I’ve seen in just one month of serving at this hospital. In addition to the list above, I’ve managed postpartum hemorrhage, shoulder dystopia, preterm labor and preterm delivery, neonatal sepsis, and ectopic pregnancy. In my two years of working L&D in the United States, I never saw three quarters of what I’ve experienced here in three weeks. Name almost any obstetrical emergency, and it’s happened in the short time that I’ve been here. 

As we walked back to the guest house, I joked with the doctor and told her I would need an IV with fluids because I was so dehydrated. “Might as well add a magnesium bolus to that because I have more signs of preeclampsia than my eclamptic patient herself,” I added because of my throbbing headache and swollen ankles from being on my feet fourteen and a half hours with only a thirty minute lunch break.

Sometimes it feels like we never get a break, and this was one of those days. But instead of seeing it only that way, I saw how God never gave me more than I could handle, and when I needed help, he sent it. Like how a nurse showed up to help me when I needed it most. And how my patient didn’t seize until I had finished passing meds to all my other patients. It was constant, but it was never too much at one time.  And at the end of the day, I was certain that I had been a part of a team that saved lives. That made a difference. 

I’ve been reading about Joshua and Caleb and the ten other spies. They went to Canaan to check out the land and give a report to the people of Israel about what they found there. They all saw the same thing; they even gave the same report - that the land was very productive and beautiful and that the cities were fortified and the people strong. But their conclusions were very, very different. The majority saw the size of the people and felt like grasshoppers in their eyes, so they decided it wasn’t worth it. But Joshua and Caleb saw the beauty of the land, remembered the promise of God, and trusted in his faithfulness. They encouraged the people to press forward even in the face of adversity.

All the spies saw the same exact thing, but had two very different perspectives based on what they chose to focus on. The giants or the beauty. The size of their own strength or the size of their God. The impossibility or the promise. 

We all have times when we feel overwhelmed, like things are out of control, or that we can never catch a break. In those moments, we choose what we focus on, and it sets the course of our day (and our entire lives) to either victory or distress, dancing in grace or drowning in burnout. 

May God find us as faithful as Caleb, who was described as having “a different spirit” and who “followed fully.” (Numbers 14:24) 

I want to be a spy. In the sense that my everyday mission is to see God’s presence and how he is at work in even the ordinary things. I want to spy him out, spot him, and make his presence and his intentions known. Even when my patients are bleeding or seizing or not breathing. Even when I feel like I have more than I can handle. 

Before walking out of the unit that night (even though I felt like running out and heading to the hills), I stopped at the baby warmer and placed my hand on the head of the baby born to my eclamptic patient. He was surrounded by family members, staring at him in wonder, and I joined them in amazement. He was sleeping peacefully without oxygen. His skin was pink, his hair was soft and curly, and his chubby belly rose and fell with each miraculous breath. He was perfect, and I took a moment to praise God and glorify him aloud before the family, who wholeheartedly agreed that the hand of God had saved the beloved mother and this newborn gift. 

Walking out of that unit was like taking one step into the promised land. God, who is bigger than our fears, gives strength to face giants and acquire the promises that he has given us in his faithfulness. If only we turn our eyes and change our perspective to see something more.