One Hundredth Delivery

Here at the hospital, we keep a giant black, fabric-covered log book where we register every birth that ever takes place at the hospital. We call it the book of life. Its probably about 18x24 inches, although I might be exaggerating a little bit in my head, but it’s definitely the biggest book I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

For some quirky reason, one of my favorite parts of each delivery is registering the information in the book. I also love looking back at old data, comparing how many births happened in the first year of the hospital and seeing how every year that number increases. Last year we set a record of 87 deliveries in one month, and I was there for it. Everyone kept talking about how crazy that month was.

Well, crazy has reached a whole new level. And this month, we blew that record out of the water with 106 deliveries. 

Even when I write that number, it doesn’t seem too impressive. But come spend a day with me at the hospital, and you will see something impressive. Two nurses and one provider run a four bed labor and delivery unit, an eight (sometimes nine when we have to add a stretcher) bed postpartum unit, and four NICU beds. We triage, labor, deliver, recover, and care postpartum for moms, well babies, and sick babies. We are a referral hospital, so we receive many evacuated patients and complicated cases. Just to give you an example, one time when I did five deliveries in five hours, one was a premature birth, one was a vacuum-assisted delivery, one was an emergency C-section for a ruptured uterus, one was a shoulder dystopia, and one was a just a normal ‘ole delivery. 

Bonkers. That’s the word one of my housemates has given to the situation. Just bonkers. Every day we come home and tell stories about how we thought it couldn’t get any more bonkers, and yet it just did. 

I happened to be at the hospital the night of the record-breaking one hundredth delivery. We had already done number 99, so we were all eagerly anticipating the arrival of the one hundredth baby in bed number 4. About that time, that baby’s heartbeat starting going poorly, so I was behind the privacy curtain starting an IV when the security guard escorted a new woman right into the middle of our labor unit. 

She was doubled over, huffing and puffing, clearly in active labor. And we had no beds. I had a tourniquet on my patient’s arm and a needle in my hand, so I told our new arrival to wait patiently for just a moment while the nurses aide went to get a stretcher. I didn’t know where the stretcher would go, but at least she would have a place to lay down. 

Right when I stuck my patient with a needle, our new laboring friend had a contraction and crumbled to the floor. She rolled over to my feet and grabbed my ankle, and I (still with needle in patient’s arm) yelled “Madame!” only to turn my head and see that the head of her baby had already been born. 

The midwife was in the unit, so I yelled her name, slapped a piece of tape over the IV not knowing whether it was even in the vein or not, and demanded my patient (who was watching this unfold on the floor at the foot of her bed) to not move a muscle. The midwife barely had time to get gloves on before she caught the baby, while I scrambled to bring a delivery kit and some towels...all a little too late since the baby had already arrived on the cold maternity floor! 

And that’s how the one hundredth baby of the month was born. Fitting, right? Because our maternity unit has turned completely bonkers. 

You know what’s funny? That woman actually came to us by moto because she was referred from a village level hospital for “labor dystocia” which essentially means the labor won’t progress to dilate the cervix and deliver the baby. Well, I’ll say her labor progressed just fine! So apparently I learned a new nursing intervention. If you have a stalled out labor, just put the woman in a straddled position on the back of a moto and send her on a bumpy motorcycle  ride out to the village and back. It will turn and shake that baby right out in no time! 

The midwife and I were laughing hysterically, and we still laugh every time we recount the story mainly because the baby was breathing and everything turned out okay, but also because you just have to laugh at how ridiculous some of these things are. 

Unfortunately, I don’t always come home laughing. Sometimes the work is too hard and the patients are too many. Sometimes I’m tired of working at 100% of my physical and intellectual capacity for twelve hours straight four times a week. Sometimes I don’t have enough time to rest and recuperate before I’m back at it again, and so I end up sleep-deprived, grumpy, and short...and I wish I was better person. Sometimes I come home and I crash or I cry and I complain to God that I don’t have what it takes to do this anymore. That I don’t even want to. 

I wonder if you’ve been there recently, or if you are there now. Let me tell you something. Last week, I locked myself in my room for a whole day with my Bible and a heart bared open before the Lord and said I’ve got to work this out. Because I’m either staying or bailing. I’m either gonna get a grip or give it up. And I needed to hear from him. 

He met me there. In my brokenness, in my frailty, in my readiness to quit. There’s a song that says, “When I’m at the end of me, I find you there.”

That’s what happened. I was nearing the end of my limit, but thankfully my heart knew where to run in that moment. It ran to the Fountain of Life, the Source, our Strength and our Salvation. I literally had a come-to-Jesus, or rather he came to me. And when I walked into the next day after having been in his presence, I was changed. I was able to rejoice in the midst of the same bonkers because I had faced my limit and then been loved and counseled by the One Without Limits. 

The story of the one hundredth birth is funny, but the road that got me to the place of being able to laugh was not easy. I’ve learned this: relying on our own strength will take us to the end of our limit, but there is a Fountain that never runs dry. 

“All my fountains are in you.” (Psalm 87.7)