The been there, done that, don’t know why…
About 4 years ago and I can still remember every feeling, smell the blood, see it all and recall the slow-motion sequence of events that was my first life-or-death emergent/ no doc delivery. I had caught babies alone, had been in on poor outcome deliveries and emergency surgeries but I was taking over for night shift and walked into a birthing room to get report. I do that every day but that morning the mom fooled us all and the baby was there and Nights and I prepared to catch. Baby was in our hands and the umbilical cord snapped off at the base and arced up in a shower of blood, streaming all over the room. I grabbed it and clamped as nights clamped baby and we auto-piloted out way through the routine and calmly went to the locker room to change our soaked uniforms, dodged into the med room, and cried. Hugged each other and bawled, so glad, so relieved, we didn’t panic, was that the most biazzare thing ever, how are we going to explain what happened, why, how? Now giggling hysterically, blood in our hair, in our shoes, we looked deranged and we were. Later we met with the docs and our managers and gave a minute by minute report on everything we did exactally right and the cord came back from pathology with no good reason why it separated like that.
I tell people “you can’t scare me, I’m a nurse.”