Lights and Sirens by Kevin Grange

Author:Kevin Grange
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

May

Delivering Babies and a Do-Not-Resuscitate Order

I spent the remainder of the week immersing myself in the L.A. Country paramedic protocols. I lugged the binder with me everywhere, cracking it open any chance I had—with my morning coffee, on the treadmill at the gym, and even at red lights until the cars behind me honked to hurry up. As I finished reading the last policy, what struck me most was how few words there were on each page. The words were typed in Arial font with a 12-point size.

The rest of the page was—literally—a gray area.

As I closed the protocol book one night, it dawned on me that I’d need to make a big transition from being successful in the classroom to becoming a street-smart paramedic. Who had the secret code to decipher this wide swath of invisible EMS ink? My two paramedic preceptors, whom I’d meet in less than four weeks. I clicked off the light and fell asleep immediately. And then, eight hours later, I helped deliver a baby for the first time.

—

“You’re having another contraction,” Julie, an RN at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, told the woman lying in bed 1 of the delivery ward. “Take a deep breath. Hold it in. Round your back and push into your bottom.”

The woman in the bed, sweating and pained with contractions, pushed with all her might.

“Great, Edie,” coached Julie. “Push! Push! Keep pushing. Almost there . . .”

The labor and delivery ward at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, known as “the Birthplace,” delivered over 1,400 babies a year. For paramedic students who might one day deliver a baby in the field—often in the backseat of a car or at a bus-stop bench, though, not in bright, hotel-like rooms with sofa chair-sleepers—UCLA arranged for each of us to spend a day in an L&D ward, observing the birthing process and practicing hands-on assessment of a newborn.

I’d arrived earlier that morning, at seven, and teamed up with Julie, an Irish gal with fair skin and freckles who balanced the sternness needed during contractions with a sweet bedside manner. “Drop your bag and grab a gown,” she’d said to me, “the woman in bed three is about to deliver.” That baby had been born covered in meconium—the thick, green stool an infant expels when in distress—so I assisted by using a blue bulb syringe to suction the little girl’s mouth and nose, clearing her airway. The second birth was a baby boy born a few weeks premature, who had to be ventilated with a bag-valve mask and rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I helped ventilate him for a few moments in the delivery room and assisted the nurses by pushing the incubator as we hurried to the NICU. Fortunately, both babies—the meconium birth and the preemie—made swift recoveries and the doctors foresaw no long-term complications.

When I returned to the L&D ward, Julie informed me another woman was about to deliver. “Three births in one day,” she exclaimed.

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