this is what midwife heaven must look like.

I know, I know....it's been forever. Whatever, we're busy people.

I am currently in Nashville at the American College of Nursing Midwives 58th Annual Meeting! This conference is 6 days of midwife heaven and I'm floating on a cloud (just like last year). 

I'll blog more about it when I get home, and I decided I want to write a nice long blog post about who midwives are and what we do - maybe debunking some myths and encouraging women to see a midwife for your gyn/well-woman/normal pregnancies and births! 

Hope everyone is enjoying their week/weekend. This almost-midwife sure is. 

Love,

Ash

Also: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MEGGIE. My sister is 23 today! xxxooo

april showers bring babies.

it is currently raining for the first time in quite some time and has been blustery all day with wind and dust advisories. i attribute my lovely morning to this acute change in weather. i got a phone call about having a patient in labor (almost completely dilated) at 7 AM, i hurried in and was met with completely dilated patient and one coming up from triage who says she needs to push! i ended up catching the walk-in's baby first then the baby of the patient i had originally come in for second. all before 10 AM! that's what i call an ideal morning. no more patients yet today (i'm still on for another 11 hours, so we'll see). i luckily live close enough to the hospital that i can take call from home. i'm working on study guides for my last exam of the semester and mayyyybe catching up on most recent episodes of my shows (doctor who, mad men, and - as you may have guessed - call the midwife).

[EDIT: the end of my 24 hours brought three babies in the last two hours of the shift, making yesterday/today my most productive shift to date....five babies! i'm a confirmed believer about the change in weather bringing the babies...one of my preceptors swears it's the change in barometric pressure. :) ]

in other news:
my dad is home! my dad is a helicopter pilot who has been on an 11 month deployment to afghanistan. we were beyond thrilled to have him home safe and sound. it's hard to press pause on a family unit for that long and that's what it feels like when dad is gone. (excuse the splotchiness...happy tears.)

we went to tucson to pick him up from the airport (they fly to a base in the states first, then commercial home). then we spent the weekend doing...NOTHING! laying around, enjoying each others company, and soaking in the fact that we are once again a complete unit! we're kind of tight knit if you hadn't guessed. first request after being in the middle east for almost a year? mexican food.

in more other news:

we are both spending all the livelong day at the hospital. too bad it's not the same hospital.

so we decided it was time to sneak away for a little fun weekend....(MIC-KEY-MOUSE!)

i'm so glad we were able to steal away for a moment. the month of may is set to be a doozy, with lots of stressful but exciting things going on (including the wedding of a certain baby sister of mine!). 

happy monday all! until next time. 

popping in to say hello!

I can't believe it's already March! The lack of posting is directly related to the craziness of schedules we have going on around here. Christian is in his family medicine rotation and loving it. One day he's doing prenatal visits and the next he's in the urgent care...so much diversity and responsibility. I think it's certainly keeping him entertained.

I am taking a moment to write you from an empty labor room at the hospital. I have two patients in labor and they're both settled nicely, one sleeping and one with a fabulous doula, so I'm trying to squeeze in a few minutes of studying. This morning I guided my 10th and 11th babies earthside and I can't believe I'm in the double digits.  Everything is feeling more comfortable and I am getting more involved in actively managing complications and deviations from normal. Every day here I am blown away by the sheer power and strength that women possess and I am constantly in awe of my patients. Joining their ranks someday with our own babe will be such an honor. I'm crossing fingers and toes that my preceptor and I will meet babies 12 and 13 this afternoon. I am enjoying this experience so so so so so so much. If only I didn't have classes running simultaneously (read: exam on Thursday! Ahhhh!). Balancing both class and clinical have been tricky.

After a 2-baby morning.

Well, I hope your March has been equally entertaining and filled with excitement. This year is sprinting by, just as I suspected.

Ash

PS - 2013 Match Day is upon us! See my previous posts on what Match Day is and what it means for 4th year medical students here. Chris' school does the match in a small space with limited invites for friends and family but live streams the entire event online! I can't wait to see where our 4th year friends end up....and once it's over the next match will be ours!!! AHHHHHH!!!?! :D

the dizzy dance.

Okay, so it's not Monday anymore. But the fabulous ladies linking up for Medical Mondays have written some pretty great stuff, so any of you readers who are med students, spouses, medically inclined, nursing students, or someday-midwives, check out their stuff! 

I don't have tons of time to write these days, but I figured explaining the dizzy dance that is our lives these days would be a nice update for friends and family readers as well. I'm going to answer some questions we get pretty frequently from people we bump into and haven't seen in a while (which is almost everyone because we don't see much of anyone these days). 

1. How far are you guys? Where are you at in school? What do you do all day?

Mrs.

Mr.

Well, that's a fabulous question. I think sometimes we lose track ourselves. Chris is on the tail end of MSIII, meaning he is in his final semester of his 3rd year of medical school. He no longer spends his days in the classroom, but instead is doing clerkship rotations at many different hospitals in most of the main branches of medicine (surgery, pediatrics, OB/GYN, psych, etc.) He is enjoying the being back in the hospital so much and truth be told, he's killing it (as in doing great....not the patients....). I don't want to brag BUT he's such a smart and compassionate person and he shines in the clinical setting. He will be finished May of next year, 2014 (I CAN'T BELIEVE WE CAN TYPE THAT NOW).  I, on the other hand, am actually nearing the end of my midwifery education (GULP). I'm in my second to last semester and will be finished in August (hopefully taking comps/boards/etc. in a similar time frame). My peers and I will walk for our master's degree graduation in May (because it was either walk 3 months early or 9 months late). I am currently on my intrapartum rotation, meaning after two semesters of all prenatal/GYN visits I'm finally attending births! And it's thrilling and terrifying and wonderful all at the same time and I'm totally in love with it. I've been in this clinical 2 weeks and I've caught 2 babies. I'm hoping things pick up soon. Most of the skills I need to learn the most can only improve with experience so I just sit and wait for the babies to come. I still have three classes I'm taking this semester as well, so there's plenty of work to be done as all these babies decide they're not ready to be born. 

Babies and pelvises!

My lovely sutured chicken breasts, practicing vaginal and perineal repairs.

2. Do you ever see each other?

Yes and no. It depends on the day. Now that my schedule has turned to call instead of scheduled clinic hours, some days I'm around a lot and some days I'm not (I was at the hospital from 1AM to 4:30 AM two nights ago to go catch my second baby!). Conversely, it also depends on his schedule. Certain rotations have been more time intensive for him (ex. surgery, OB) whereas other have been less so. Pediatric outpatient was a fun one with a nice schedule. On OB he was taking call overnight at the hospital. The past few weeks we've been having our evenings together which is nice. We've also carved out some time to take a few little trips within a few hours of home and attempted to catch a few movies (we got a bunch gift of cards for Christmas and my birthday...best gift you can get us!). It's been nice spending some good time together. I've also made an effort to meet him at the hospital for dinner. The food is usually super cheap.

Date night at the children's hospital.

3. What kind of doctor does Chris want to be?

This one is easy! Since his undergrad days working as an EMT he has wanted to be an emergency medicine physician. I think this is such a fabulous fit for him. During his rotations he has also enjoyed internal medicine and OB. 

4. What kind of midwife do you want to be?

Well, I'm going to school to be a certified nurse midwife (CNM) meaning I was(/am) an RN before going back to school. There are many different credentials for midwifery for varying entry into practice and education levels and it can be quite confusing. To learn more about midwives and our philosophy/model of care you can read about us here. For definitions of the different midwifery governing organizations and different types of midwives click here. CNMs tend to work in the hospital setting but may also practice in attached or freestanding birth centers or at home births. I hope to have an opportunity to pursue birth center practice in the future but am also really enjoying my time at my current hospital clinical site. We'll see where this path leads me.

5. WE WANT PICTURES OF VIESA, DANGIT.

Okay, that's not a question but our dog is really cute and awesome and is the perfect med dog. She is patient with us and forgiving when we both spend long days attending to our respective patients. She is the best stress reliever and gives us a great excuse to get outside. 

We love you, Vies. I don't think we'd be able to survive all this without you!

There's a tiny glimpse at what's going on with us. I can't go any further because I have a study guide and an assignment due tonight and I'm on call tomorrow! Happy reading, friends.

Love,

Ash

updates, oh the updates.

I have four or so updates posts in the works covering Christmas, New Year's Eve/Day, my birthday, etc. but they'll all have to wait because every moment I spend not doing homework/studying I am thinking about doing homework/studying.

I just popped by to say I reached an exciting milestone in my midwifery career today....I attended my first birth as a primary provider! A powerful mama delivered her big, beautiful baby boy into my waiting hands. It was absolutely down the coolest thing that's ever happened to me (which I feel better describes it than saying it's the coolest thing I've ever done...she did all the work!).

After baby came we discovered a true knot in the umbilical cord! This occurs more commonly with a long cord or with identical twins whose cords can become entangled, seen in ~1% of pregnancies. True knots are dangerous to babies if they become too tight and cut off the oxygen supply to the baby. Luckily in this case the knot did not appear to be tight and mama enjoyed hearing about how her baby was probably summersaulting like an acrobat inside of her. My preceptor said she does not see true knots very often and I'm choosing to view it as a beautiful omen. :)

It looked similar to this example of a true knot (from this source):

This very special baby also got a onesie given to us by our midwifery faculty for our first catch. We were so in love with this idea when they were given to us and it was such a joy giving it away (the mom thought it was so cool). [It says: "A Georgetown midwife helped me out!" with our mascot, Jack the Bulldog.]

All in all, today was a great day and I believe - as one of my midwife preceptors told me earlier today - that this feeling is what keeps midwives coming back to work every day (even with the long, demanding hours and sleepless nights). It's like magic. And how many people get to say they see real live magic every day?

This lucky girl says goodnight. I've got 24 hours of call (hopefully full of many babies!) coming up at 7AM tomorrow morning.

XO,
Ash

2 years.

i'm emerging from [grad-school-induced] radio silence to say that i am in love with a wonderful person. we have been together for seven and a half years and as of today we've been married for two of those.

christian, you are my world. it is a privilege to be your partner in life. and who knew it could be this fun??

here's to us on our anniversary.

Warning: one cannot simply watch one episode of Downton Abbey

I have a huge paper due this coming week that I've barely started so obviously it would be the weekend I decide to watch ONE episode of Downton Abbey while I do dishes and become absolutely engrossed - I've had it on my 'to watch' list forever. This whole TV online thing is a blessing and a curse but mostly a curse (to productivity at least). This show is every bit of naughtiness and craziness of soap opera dramas and trashy TV that I cannot stand to watch unless set in early 1900s England.

I'm already a PBS nut and in love with period TV/films/books. I should've known I'd be headed down a slippery slope. "Just one episode..." Who was I kidding? Reminds me of when I started watching Mad Men in early 2011....a sad (or awesome?) 6 days in sweatpants in front of the TV/computer. Sigh. I think I may need a media time out. It's hard when you go to school online, though. It's not like you can just open all your paper stuffs and walk away from the computer for a while. All my instructions, lectures, assignments...all online. I guess in the scheme of things, though, I'd rather my Achilles heel be awesome TV (with arguably some sliiiiiiight educational value??...Am I stretching too far here?) than stupid old Facebook.

It doesn't help that I've been sick on and off all week. And Christian was in LA over the weekend presenting his research at the American Heart Association Resuscitation Conference - have I mentioned lately what a proud wife I am? I'm usually less-than productive when he's gone.

All right. I suppose now there's nothing left to do but to do it. I'll try to use my less-than-legal means of watching season 3 episodes as a break time reward. Wish me luck.


XO,
Ash