Missing midwifery

Afternoon everyone.

Apologies for the delay in my blogs at the moment. I'm going to pull out the usual excuse, but this placement has been hard. As many of you will know (or experienced yourselves) in our 2nd year we have to have a certain number of hours doing non-midwifery placements. For me this includes: gynaecology, intensive care, sexual health clinic and the neonatal unit.

I started my gynaecology placement on the 13th October. It consisted of 4 x 1 week stints in different departments within gynaecology. First up was the early pregnancy unit (EPU). I have to be honest, this was the week I thought would be the most relevant, but I was dreading it. I was extremely apprehensive about the sadness and loss I would experience, in retrospect I was glad I had prepared myself for it. The first day was awful, I was seeing scans of people who had experienced miscarriages, who were being told they had lost their babies and I was also observing their counselling sessions. I felt absolutely heartbroken for these women and their families.

Although the staff nurses were lovely to me, the one thing that shocked me was how blasé it was to them. And on the rare occasion, that they were insensitive about these women and their lifestyles and choices. I found this only added to the sadness I felt during the few shifts I had on the EPU. I couldn't help but think, in a parallel universe, in another time or another place, that these women would have had healthy pregnancies and I could have seen them antenatally, been present for their births or seen them postnatally with healthy babies. I know midwifery itself can be tainted with sadness, trust me, I've seen my share of tragedy pre-EPU placement but the fact that it was pretty much constant and so intense really affected me.

I then went on to the gynaecology ward. Despite the fact that the ward wasn't sad, I felt resentful of it as I felt it was irrelevant to my training. I wasn't allowed to do anything and it basically just involved me running errands, walking women to the toilet and hanging around. Not exactly what I would consider a productive use of my time. I did see a woman whose cannula had tissued and had had antibiotics run into her arm, so that was interesting to see and a note to myself to always flush cannulas!

This week I have been in theatres, and although I really wasn't expecting to, I loved it! My mentor was fab and I saw some amazing things. I saw transobturator tapes (TOT) inserted (a treatment for stress incontinence), I saw all sorts of repairs, I saw a bi-cornuate uterus via hysterosocopy and laparoscopy (and then got tested on my knowledge of it by the registrar)… I'll include some stuff about bi-cornuate uterus' at the bottom in case anyone is interested. I also saw a vaginal hysterectomy, a full abdominal hysterectomy and all sorts of other things. Out of everything, I found this the most relevant to midwifery. Being able to visualise the female anatomy was unbelievably helpful and I have learnt that I'm going to constantly do pelvic floor exercises for the rest of my life to avoid a TOT!

The last place to go is gynae outpatients, the other girls have told me it's pretty good there so I'm hoping it will be a good few days. The aim of this post was not to bias people's opinions of gynaecology or non-midwifery placements. As I've said, I have found it useful and some it has been invaluable. However, I miss midwifery, I honestly do. This has confirmed to me that I never want to be a nurse and has just fuelled the passion I have for midwifery. The advice I have for anyone feeling disconnected to midwifery is: find the midwifery aspects in what you're doing, talk to your cohort about how they feel, write reflections and just think about the fact that these placements are only short. I can't wait to get back to uni and I am going to start counting down the days until my labour ward placement in December, finally going to try and start bumping my catch count!

N x