So some of you were wondering about my clay cervices.  I made them because I have/had a skill deficit in distinguishing between 5 and 6 cm; and between 6 and 7 cm.  For most of my training these distinctions did not matter.  But I am getting some training in a very medical based practice now where everyone gets epidurals because I need to understand how to keep mom and baby safe when mom chooses these options.  Because epidurals can tend to slow labor, I need to be able to tell if mom has made change.

That being said, what midwife doesn’t want to perfect all her hands on skills – even the ones she doesn’t anticipate needing to rely on too often.  I found a great skills lab that gives directions for making clay cervices.

Enjoy!

A midwife is ONLY as good as her ability to assess what is really going on with the mother.  I am having fun today working on improving my assessment skills – both hands on and in multiple choice format (remember, I have my competency test coming up).

I found a fabulous resource for all those novice midwives who want to build their skills slowly at home.  Why not use an online study module?  Here is a Labour and Delivery Care Module you can study from at your own pace, or use to supplement whatever course you are using. I’m spending time in study session two – assessment in labor and improving my skills with flashcards, my model pelvis, clay cervices, an almost newborn sized doll and pillow.

Enjoy!

I almost feel like I should apologize to you, dear readers.  I have been somewhat absent for the last few months.  I confess to a terrible thing  - I took 22 credits this semester.  It wasn’t even because I had some need to take a bunch of classes to graduate on time.  I was simply interested in the material and figured I could handle it.  The good news is I did make it through alive and sane.  But to do that I had to let so many things go.

My last class was today, but the semester will not end for me yet.  Just like last semester, I need to take an incomplete until I finish all the requirements.  This seems to be a standard thing with the dual degree students in nursing, at least it was.  They changed the program for the students who started this year.  I started last year, so I am under the old system.  I take public health and nursing classes at the same time – literally.  This is the second semester I was scheduled to be in two places at once.

I still need to finish some clinical hours, and I have to take my midwifery competency test to be finished with all the semester’s course work.  I plan to have that done in less than three weeks.  So even though I’m not in class or working on homework, I am restudying every bit of midwifery information and quizzing myself with digital flashcards.  The test is 350 questions, and I’l have 3 hours to complete it. As I write that out it seems impossible, so I must have the number of questions wrong – they usually give us a minute per question.

Interesting side note to this semester, I did my family practice clinical hours in the HIV clinic – what I have been told is one of the largest HIV programs in the USA.   I decided to do this so I was competent to care for HIV infected pregnant women in my global work.  But now that I’ve gotten my toes wet I have to admit I love it.  HIV care is really interesting – from the complexity of the monitoring to the risk factors of the patients.  So now, if I can bend the universe to my will, I plan to be an HIV specialist midwife.

Sometimes I think I must be really smart.  I understand so much, I have learned so much. Then, I have to prescribe a medication and I realize I’m not quite as brilliant as I would like to be.

I wish I knew why medications were so hard for me, but I don’t.  There are just so many names, and they are so similar, and there is so much to remember about each medication.  It feels like I’ll never have a good grasp of this knowledge, so how could I ever provide good care to my clients. Then I wonder why I ever thought I could be a nurse, a nurse-midwife or a family nurse practitioner.

OK, pity party is over.  I know the only way to really learn them is to use the information.  It is hard, but I’ll get it…eventually.