Delivering Babies:

My first woman in labor

Our ambulance dispatch center received a frantic call from a private physicians office; they had a patient in labor. Hurry!

We responded code-3 and arrived at the doctor’s office a few minutes later. Both my partner and I had just graduated from EMT school four months prior to this.

I was thinking to myself “ah ha, this is my big chance. I can feel it!”

I began reviewing emergency childbirth procedures in my mind. This was the call I had been waiting eight long months for. An incredibly long four months in the classroom and four months working out here on the “streets.”

Pulling the gurney out of the back of the ambulance, I made sure I had the O.B. kit. I guessed it was up to me to go show this doctor what delivering a baby was all about.

I entered the doctor’s office like superman.

“Where’s the patient?” I announced.

The Doctor looked older than God to me and I thought, “We’ll have to show him a thing or two about the ‘new procedures’ for delivering babies.” 

He was so old, he probably still had his patients squat over a log.

The Doctor saw us and waved us over to an exam room. I walked up to him and said, “What seems to be the problem here?”

The look on his face said, “You’re an idiot.”  He grabbed the end of my gurney and pulled it out of my hands. “Well the problem is that your late and this woman here is early,”

Moving it into the exam room and next to the bed, he adjusted the gurneys height, pulled the head up, put the side handrail down and had the pregnant woman moved over faster than I thought possible.

“He certainly knows his way around a gurney.” I thought.

He then rattled off a list of medications he had given her, all sorts of times and measurements and finished with her entire medical history…all in about six seconds.  He looked over at me. His eyebrows shot upwards as if to say, “You got all that?”

I starred back and stuttered, “Um, yea, ok, I got most of that. Could you spell that thing for me, that medication you gave her?”

I was desperately trying to write everything down in my little report book. He grabbed it out of my hands, stuffed it in my shirt pocket, put my hands on the railing of the gurney and started shoving the gurney and me down the hall.

He told me to, “just try and get her to the hospital safely, OK?”

I was stumbling along trying to ask over my shoulder, “Um, yes Sir, Um Doctor Sir, but I’m supposed to know what stuff she has had and stuff like that Sir, um, Doctor.”

He shoved me out the door and said, “Get your ass to the hospital, I’ll meet you there.”

The woman on the gurney turned around and yelled, “Don’t leave me!”

The doctor waved to her. “Don’t worry honey. I gave you a little something to hold it off for a few minutes. You’ll be fine.”

This was not turning out like I had expected. That doctor had treated us like crap and I was there to try and save the day. Isn’t that why people call ambulances?

We loaded her into our rig. My partner drove and I was in the back with the lady holding her huge belly. She was moaning and groaning.

It was very unnerving.

My partner turned on the lights and siren, pulled out into traffic and sped towards the hospital.

In the back of the ambulance I was very busy moving all over the place and doing absolutely nothing.

The lady began to scream and I increased my nothingness. I was loosing confidence rapidly. I opened the obstetrical emergency childbirth packet and laid it neatly on the bench seat, patting each individual item with my hand for no apparent reason.

The ambulance was speeding over a long highway and every time it rose up on the crest of a hill the lady sighed with relief as the baby became weightless and the pressure inside her subsided.

But when the ambulance bottomed out, she would scream like I had never heard anyone scream before in my life. My God!

I yelled up to my partner, “Go faster…and do more hills!”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror and yelled “What?”

“More hills, the tops of hills. DO MORE HILLS!” I screamed.

He yelled back, “What?”

I began to pantomime. Holding my belly with both hands I pretended to float and made a happy face. Then I imitated gravity pulling me down and my face contorted in agony. I was sure he would understand what I meant.

He looked at me and nodded his head and yelled, “What?”

Pain shot through me as the lady grabbed my arm and dug her nails into my skin and then she screamed even more horribly. She drew blood and I was not in control of anything. Chaos!

I moved down to the end of the gurney so I was looking directly at her vagina. I was sure the baby was coming.

I squatted there like a baseball catcher. “Hey batter batter batter.” Like I was going to catch the baby coming out.

The lady screamed, made a grunting sound and blood and fluid erupted from her vagina splattering me in the face.

I was aghast!  The color drained from my face as I stood up and moved to the side of the gurney, out of harms way.

I just sat there for a few minutes, stunned. I tried not to faint as I wiped my face off. A piece of bloody tissue slid down my forehead onto my eyebrow and I tried desperately not to faint.

I looked out the window and noticed we were pulling in to the hospital drive way. I snatched the phone off the wall and dialed the code for the emergency room. I was supposed to have called ahead.

By the time I had them on the line a doctor had already opened the rear doors to the ambulance. I feebly said into the phone, “We’re here’’ and hung up.

We wheeled her through the E.R. and directly onto a waiting elevator. The doctor asked me some questions but all I could muster was, “We got her from a doctors office,”

The look on his face said, “You’re an idiot.”

The elevator doors opened to the obstetrics floor and we rushed her into a room full of nurses. One of them backed away from me saying, “What happened to you?”

I had no idea what just happened to me.

We retrieved our gurney and as I was leaving I couldn’t think of anything to say to the woman but I heard “Have a nice baby” come out of my mouth. My God!

While waiting for the elevator my partner pointed at my head, “What’s in your hair?”

As the doors slowly closed behind us I heard the woman scream, “Get me to someone who knows what the hell they are doing!”