I really have seen it all...

Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.
— Jules Renard

I really have seen it all... I'm an OB nurse!

~ saying found on a coffee mug in a nurses' lounge.

     As a nurse in Labor/Delivery, I learned very quickly that people deal with stressful situations in different and sometimes very odd ways. Birthing a baby is a very stressful event... and our TV sitcoms and movies have all depicted this with frantic fathers-to-be racing to the hospital with their pregnant partners huffing and puffing next to them. In the 37 years I have been a nurse I have seen some unbelievably funny responses to this stress, and have developed a repertoire of stories that are always a hit at parties... or laid-back Saturday nights on the unit when we didn't have any patients, had cleaned the unit storage area and organized shelves and still were looking for stuff to do till the next patient showed up. That's when the story tellers would start to spin tales of OB long ago... or just last week...

      I was working the afternoon shift on the Labor/Delivery unit. I don't remember the day of the week or even the season, but a patient had come in after being seen in her doctor's office for complaints of labor contractions. He had sent her in to the hospital where she was joined by her husband. Once she got all settled into her hospital room, everything sort of... stopped. This happens sometimes, and one way to "stir things up" was to get the patient up walking. After monitoring the fetus on the fetal heart monitor for about an hour, we were satisfied that the fetus was in good shape and so the patient was allowed to get up to walk.

     At this point I need to give you a physical description of this lady. She was almost 6 foot tall, and very, very large. Nine months pregnant, she probably weighed close to 300 pounds. She was elegantly dressed when she came in, but had to exchange her clothing for a hospital gown. The kind that are totally open in the back. I found her a second hospital gown to put on backwards to cover up her backside, and she put on some footies that had treads on the bottom. This attire, familiar to a lot of nurses, is the attire of the ambulatory labor patient. Because things hadn't gotten going much, she did not have an IV. Her husband was much shorter than she was, and much slighter in build. Both of them seemed very pleasant, and were happily anticipating the arrival of their first baby. I walked with them to show them where on the unit they could go, and asked that they come back in forty-five minutes so I could reapply the fetal monitor and reassess her situation.  Off they went, chatting happily.
                                             
     The unit was fairly small, so in 45 minutes, this couple made dozens of "laps" back and forth. Each time they passed by the nurses' station, they would smile and say something pleasant to the staff sitting there. The unit secretary on evenings was a large, boisterous woman who was a little mouthy, but who was always pleasant. She wore blue scrubs just like the rest of the OB staff. From casual observation, it really was impossible to tell who was a doctor, who was a nurse, who was a tech or who was a unit secretary. Anyway, at about the time they were due back in the room for me, they passed the nurses' station again. They chatted briefly with the unit secretary, who joked with them about the stalled labor. "Well, if this walking doesn't work, maybe we can try cartwheels next..." the unit secretary joked. I was on the phone at the time with her physician, who had called in for a status update. This physician was an "old school" doctor, who expected nurses to follow his protocols and to update him often. He was older and quite dignified. He commanded respect, and I certainly wanted to follow his orders... I was quite frankly scared to death of him.  I told the couple to go down to the room and I'd get down there as soon as I could. I told the doctor that I was going to put her back on the monitor and I'd call him back in about 15 minutes with an update.

     When I got down to their room, I pushed on the door to enter and it wouldn't open. I pushed again a little harder-- it still wouldn't open. I had to push quite hard for the door to budge much at all, and when I got it open enough for me to squeeze through the door, the first thing I saw was that all the furniture had been shoved against the walls. The bed, the bedside stand, the overbed table, the fetal monitor-- all were pushed against the walls, making a large open space in the middle of the room. In the corner almost behind the door sat the father-to-be, cowering a bit with his head down. "What the...." if I didn't say it, I certainly thought it... " Then I noticed the patient. She had removed the second hospital gown, so she was wearing only the one, and let's just say the moon had risen that night already. She was standing in the opposite corner from the father-to-be with both her arms raised high over her head. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING????" I asked, and I hope I didn't shout it, though probably I did. "I told you...." muttered the father to the patient The patient stared at me like I was a little crazy.

     "That nurse at the desk told me if walking wouldn't make me have contractions to try cartwheels," she said.  "NO!! NO!!! NO!!!" I cried. "You can't do that!" and then I said what may go down in my personal history as the weirdest thing I ever said to a patient, "As long as I am your nurse, you may not do cartwheels in the hospital."  Then, after replacing the furniture in the correct locations, I completed my nursing assessment in as professional a way as I could and hurried out of the room. I had to hurry for two reasons-- I had promised to call the doctor with an update and I feared I would burst into laughter at any moment. The mental image of a 300 pound pregnant woman doing cartwheels in the hospital was just too funny...

                                
      I made it out to the nurses' station before I laughed. I told the other nurses and the unit secretary what had occurred. They laughed with me, and asked if I was going to tell the doctor what had happened. Whoo boy, I hadn't considered that. Well, if I didn't tell him someone else would so I decided to go for it. When I called the doctor I told him the story and at first there was no response at all. Dead silence on the other end of the phone. Then he said, "Well, sometimes I think I have seen and heard everything... and then stuff like this happens..." That was all he said, but he and I had a much better relationship after that.


     This happened at least 20 years ago, but I was at a reunion of some of the people who had worked on that unit about a year ago and somebody asked me about it. It has taken its place in the legends of the unit. And 20 some years later I am still chuckling over the mental image of that very large, very pregnant woman about to do a cartwheel in the labor room... Hee hee hee .....