Conveyor Belt of Sotomayor

Okay, so I have been putting off writing about these last three days (it's actually Friday, although I will post this as if it were Wednesday), because the task just seems too daunting by the time we finally get home showered and eat and ready for bed. So to make sure I get it done, or at least kind of done, I have make an executive decision to just blog about the three days combined into one--a highlights blog if you will.

To start off I will attach the two video clips that I took of the whole system. They aren't that great, and I didn't catch any real action and actually it isn't as cool as I wish it was because I had to do it at a time when I wasn't actually busy, so you don't really get the full "factory" effect, but whatevs. PLUS, remember that it is a hospital, and despite the fact that nobody really cares if you take pictures (or video) down here, I still felt a little bad, and didn't want to add too much to the lack of privacy problem. Enough of the disclaimers, here you go:

So as for other highlights. It really has been a blast working in this hospital. To start, I will try to explain a little more about the conveyor belt system. In the video I showed you were the patients come in. I'm still not sure how they pass them over that 3.5 foot tall wall thing, but that will just be a mystery I might never know. So they come in through there on, and somewhere between there and the main labor room, they pick up a stretcher because that is how they come in to us. These stretchers are incredible. Think MASH. I don't even like that show, never really watched it, but that is the picture that the whole thing brings to my mind.

Woman enters room on stretcher. She is put at the end of the line so they can strap her up to their ONE fetal heart rate and contraction monitoring unit (the High Risk room has one for each patient). For those of you who may not be as familiar with the whole birthing scene, in the U.S. we have one of these for EACH patient for the whole labor process. Anyway, so they come in, and the woman last to enter who was strapped to the machine, gets pulled off and bumped down the line (this is where the yellow friends come in), and the woman gets strapped in. So this one wall (the side where the most medical peeps are on in the video) is the vaginal birth side, and as the woman progress in dilation they get pushed ahead or back in the line (again, thank you Yellow Peeps).

When they get dilated to a 10 or sometimes after the baby is already crowning, the doctor yells "PARTO!" (Birth!) and the yellow guys come running and they whisk the woman off into white room with all of the stirrups. The woman then has to crab walk/crawl herself up on to the bed from the stretcher. (Mind you, this is when she is just 2-3 minutes from giving birth!) The doctor comes in, gets dressed, they open the sterile pack, yadda yadda yadda, and out comes the baby. I saw one today where the doctor barely got her gloves on before the baby was coming out! I thought we were going to have a baby on the floor!

After the birth, they show the baby for the mom for a total of maybe .5 seconds and they whisk it off to the nursery. The mom then stays and gets stiched up from her tear or the episiotomy (as a standard they give all first-time moms an episiotomy, yep. . . sad). PS--sorry if this is TMI for some of you, feel free to tune out if it gets too much. I kind of forget that not everybody loves this stuff. After they are done with the mom they bring her back in a stretcher. I think it is actually one with fresh sheets and they have her slide herself on to it and they wheel her into the immediate-postpartum room. (That is IF they have room, if not, they get lined up and down both sides of the hallways).

They stay in there and if they are lucky, they get to see their babies after 2 or 3 hours. They don't really even get to hear any updates about how their baby is doing or anything. Nothing. I'd like to hear how any of you moms out there would feel about that happening if that was the case for you. If they have had a C-section, they don't get to have their baby from anywhere from 5 to 8 hours! They simply just do not have the staff to take all of the babies in to the moms and monitor them, etc. etc., but it's still sad. As the week went on and the nurses and doctors trusted us more, they let us just take the babies in to the moms ourselves. Awesome.

So that is the process for the normal delivery moms. The C-sections and miscarriages are on the other side. That is probably the part I feel the worst about the whole hospital is that the women with miscarriages have to be in there with all of the women who are still going to have their baby alive and healthy with them. They also have to be in the same postpartum units, including the ones after the immediate-postpartum unit where all of the moms get to have their babies on their beds with them, while they just lay there by themselves. So sad.

The C-sections are lined up along the wall and they take them in one by one into one of the six OR C-section rooms. I never really got how they run that system, because I didn't really see any rhyme or rhythm to who they decided to take next. And yeah so that is the process of Sotomayor.

It's really not that bad. They do the very best they can with what they have and they have a good system. I just sometimes wish they could be a little more personal. One other thing that I have come to love about the whole thing is that every half hour the nurse at the nurses table calls out the last names of all of the patients and they have to raise their hands to indicate that they are still there. It is like role call. And when the doctors or nurses come up to the patients, they don't even pretend to know who they are they just ask them for their last name, and if they aren't the right one, they just move along down looking for them, or if they get impatient, they just yell out the name and wait for a woman to raise her hand like they do during roll call. It is definitely a little different than what I am used to where you at least try to pretend you know who you are going in to see, even if you have to check their chart or name plaque on the outside of the door. Not wrong, just different.

Okay, well now I am actually pretty tired and spent WAY more time blogging about the conveyor belt than I was going to so I will get to the other stuff in no particular order later I guess.