Bad outcome

I didn't start shaking until I was walking down the hall toward my clinical seminar. It was after I'd left the operating room where the patient was quietly crying and the doctors were counting instruments before sewing up her stomach. After the father had followed the perinatologist and his child to the NICU. After I'd run into the family, anxiously waiting outside for any information I could give them. After I changed out of my blood-splattered scrubs.

I entered seminar, forty minutes late, and the instructor immediately stopped talking about tocolytic drugs and asked for my report. I gave my classmates the long version of this: woman laboring with twins, premature, normal vaginal birth for baby A, complications, lots of worry, blood, emergency, nurses questioning the doctor's methods, baby B born but not breathing, no heartbeat, mom: "why isn't he crying," more emergency, there's the heartbeat. When seminar ended and my classmates left, the instructor told me that I'd seen "about the worst thing that can happen." She warned me I might have some trauma and could be called in to give a deposition. Call her if I need to talk.

The adrenaline that I hadn't noticed until I was walking down the hall was starting to wane and I noticed that my shoulders were sore from being tense for four hours. I was cold and hungry and wanted to talk and talk about what I'd seen, but also didn't want to tell anyone else about it. I returned to the break room to grab my bag and coffee, coffee I hadn't had a chance to drink all morning, to discover that some well-meaning nurse had thrown out my cold 3/4 of a grande nonfat mocha. What a jerk.

The odd thing about OB work is that the patients aren't actually sick, yet two people could suffer lifelong disability or death if things don't happen the way they should. It's so easy to get overcomplacent or alternatively treat the event as some sort of critical emergency. And neither response is appropriate.