Third Year

I haven’t posted for awhile because I have been seriously thinking about discontinuing this blog. It turned out my Normal Childbearing placement was much harder than I had expected. Not so much the huge learning curve that it is, but being in a midwifery student role. When you go back to school at the age I did, and you have been submerged in midwifery for the last 20 years, it is hard to accept certain things. Things that I cannot talk about in this blog. Part of it is the midwife I am being trained to be is not the midwife I had in mind when I applied. How could I have been so wrong about midwifery in Ontario? The first few weeks of my placement seemed like a dream come true until the reality of the "real midwifery" became apparent. I would love to be able to share my thoughts and frustrations here, but we have been warned by the ethics and legal committee from McMaster way too many times about being careful with what we post on social media. Examples of students that were expelled from school because of the inappropriateness of what had been said online were highlighted too many times. Of course, maintaining the confidentiality of clients and people you work with is a must, but there is huge fear of someone finding what you wrote unprofessional or inappropriate. When I’m censored on what I write, I feel I'm not true to the blog or reader. I have thought long and hard if it is worth continuing with the blog, but I do miss going back and reading my achievements when I need some encouragement. Of course, I could just journal at home, but somehow it does not give me the same motivation to write.

There is one thing that I can say, and that is I was very close to dropping out. There were times when I didn’t think I could go on with another day. I felt so alone and isolated. I hated that I was not enjoying what I had waited for so long, in fact that I was dreading every day of it. My frustrations with midwifery were not the only hard aspect of the placement. The rigour of this program is beyond humane. Being on-call 24 hours a day with only four days off a month plus weekly tutorials that need preparation and online contributions is extremely stressful.  The witching hours, poor nutrition and stress made it very hard for me to manage my Fibromyalgia condition, which added, even more, challenges to this program. The lack of clear expectations from preceptors and working with multiple ones, also adds much to the frustration.

The following poem was not written by me but by a senior student. It was published in a newsletter for the midwifery students association, and it spoke so close to my heart that I decided to include in this post.

The fact that I had a summer placement and went straight into third-year, starting with an emergency skills’ intensive week and then six university credits taken online in six weeks did not help me process what I had gone through during the summer. I feel I need some serious counseling before I can get on with my senior placement. Which by the way, is right around the corner, because we should be getting our list for the senior placement lottery in mid-January. Somehow I need to find a way to get the strength to finish this program. Everyone keeps telling me that I’m almost there, but when I think of the senior placement, it brings a shiver down my spine. For now, I will just concentrate in finishing my third-year placements which I'm actually enjoying. I'm especially looking forward to my international placement coming in March but I will leave that for another post.

First Placement

Six weeks into the placement and I’m still loving it. I was going to write a post during my first week, but then I thought I should wait until I had a more realistic perception of this placement. During my first week I did mostly observation and there was nothing expected of me so it is very easy to enjoy. Now that I have completed one quarter of this placement I feel I have a better feeling of what the rest might be. I have to say that I hit the jackpot as far as preceptors are concerned. I love both my preceptors and I’m really enjoying the experience of working in a midwifery clinic. I’m finding the perfect balance between clinic work and births. I love how my schedule can change without any notice, like the other day I was heading to the clinic for a day full of prenatal appointments when we got called to a birth. My day turned out completely different than I had planed with a slimy baby sliding into my hands at the end of the day. How can I not love that? My preceptors are very rigorous about me taking time off to spend with my family as well as taking time to study.  They have no problems challenging me to try new skills, but at the same time being very accepting and understanding of common beginners mistakes. I feel I’m in a safe learning space where I can ask questions and be honest. For the first time in this program I feel I’m experiencing a learning style that I can really learn from.

The one part that I have to confess that I’m not enjoying that much is the tutorial component of the course. I have a great tutor and great colleagues in the group but the format of online conference type of thing is awful. You get to do scenario discussion with a whole group of women through just sound. I have to wear a headphone with a microphone for 3 hours and every time you want to speak I have to press a microphone button. There is no body language to read so often we end up interrupting somebody else who started taking at the same time as you. It’s talking into space and it sounds so unnatural. I really dislike this format but I understand that there isn’t another way to do it with us in our placement in clinics all over Ontario. However, my suggestion would be to not have tutorial run congruent to placement and maybe as a subject on its own during the semester before placement starts. I find it is extremely busy as it is during placement and we are constantly looking up things anyways, I don’t feel I have the time or the energy to write an essay on top of the learning we are already doing during placement.

The wait continues...

I’m having a really hard time writing in the blog lately. I’m not quite sure why, because lack of time is not an issue right now. Maybe it’s because there are so many things I want to write about and can’t focus on something to get started. I have written at least five posts in my head, but never seem to be able to organize my thoughts once at the computer. I know that feeling all too well. You know, when you have to start an essay. I know what I want to write about, I have a million ideas of what to say, but once in front of the computer my mind just goes blank.

I was planning on writing once I was in Brazil again, at the end of February for a week. This time I stayed with another cousin, and he lives right in front of the beach. I mean, I could see and hear the waves from the balcony of his apartment.  I went to the beach every day, all day long, and it was once more very refreshing for my health as well as my mind. But it wasn’t until I was flying back and at 37000 feet altitude somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, that I started to think about my upcoming placement. What triggered me to think of it was the sheer exhaustion of an 11 hour, red eye flight. As I toss and turn on my narrow seat, I started to think of how I was going to cope with all the sleepless nights, long hours, the learning curve, and the stress of being under pressure all the time. I mean, I have worked as a doula before and know well what is like to be up all night at a birth. However, after the birth I would have days to recover and that won’t be the case in midwifery.

View from my cousin's apartment in Rio

My daily meditation

You know, this placement is approaching faster than I can catch my breath, and I’m starting to get really nervous. Actually, I can say that a little panic is beggining to set in as I hear from many of my colleagues that they are at the end of their rope. They are almost there with only four weeks left of placement, and it is normal to feel fatigued and discouraged. I remember feeling exactly the same way at the end of every semester. I always survived so I keep telling myself this placement should be no different.

To calm my nerves and see if I would get excited again about midwifery, I started re-reading some of my favorite midwifery novels. Many of those novels inspired me to be a midwifery student even more than I already wanted and I remember when I read them for the first time, midwifery was still a far away dream for me, or I was still in the grueling process of becoming admitted to the MEP. Now I’m a second year midwifery student starting her first placement really soon and about to get a taste of the real thing. The books that I love the most are “baby Catcher “ by Peggy Vincent, “Lady’s hands, Lion’s heart” by Carol Leonard” and the “Birth House” by Ami McKay. I have to say the trick worked. I’m once more getting excited about being involved with births. It is great to read those books as a student, knowing that I will be a midwife very soon. Pregnant women and births have always been my passion and a huge part of my life, and as I have said before, I never felt so disconnected from it since I have started the MEP program. I am aware that this is about to change big time as soon as I start this placement and I will probably be begging to not see another pregnant woman in front of me by the time I’m almost done. But right now I just want to feel connected with the birth world again and devour new knowledge.

I still have another four weeks before my placement start and even though this may seem like an eternity for my colleagues doing their placement in the winter term and counting the days to be finished, I know it will fly for me. Especially because I have two trips planned for the end of April. I will meet my dad in California and take a road trip through Los Angeles, San Francisco, through the mountains (we will visit Lake Tahoe), down to Las Vegas, through the Grand Canyon and end up in Phoenix. I will then fly back home, will have two days to get my house back in order after being gone for 10 days (which I tell you, it will not be good), pack and leave for Orlando with my Family. We will be spending 4 days there and will visit Universal Studios. At this point, my dad will also have flown from Phoenix to Tampa beach and will meet my family and I in Orlando. He won’t be coming with us to the parks because he is there for an aviation fair. My dad is a pilot and, oh! by the way, so is my husband. Just in case you were wondering how the heck do I get to do all that travelling, pay tuition, be a full-time student and support 5 children. Yup, I get almost free tickets with Air Canada. Pretty cool, eh? That makes me think of where could I go for one of my electives in third year, which could be an international placement.

Allright, I think I will stop now, and this could be a topic for another post.

Break Time

Oh my gosh! I knew it had been a long time since I had written, but oh my… I didn’t realize it had been that long. My apologies for the long absence, I won’t even try to make excuses for it. I’ll just dive right into where I had left.

The lottery results were announced in October and I got my last choice, Community Midwives of Hamilton during spring/summer term. Yay for not having to move, crap for not having a summer break. I could be complaining about how terrible it will be to be in placement when my kids are off school and how I’m not going to be able to go camping and all, but instead I will concentrate on how having a summer placement can work for me.

Second year turned out to also be very stressful. I really enjoyed clinical skills but the speed and the amount of information thrown at us was overwhelming. Pharmacology and reproductive anatomy took a great deal of my studying time which often resulted in me panicking before a clinical skills exam having totally ignored it until the day before. I remember one occasion, the day before my midterm clinical skills exam, where I was so frustrated with the interruptions at home that I ended up checking into a hotel so I could study no-stop until the exam the next day. I was so burned out at the end of this semester and my fibromyalgia was so intense that I don’t know how I would have gone straight into a winter placement. Given that the 3 weeks off we have between the semester and beginning of placement are during the Christmas holidays, it really means no rest for me. Even though I absolutely love this time of the year I do find it exhausting.

So, instead of starting a placement completely burned out I took a trip to Brazil with my family. Yes, you heard me right. I went to Brazil for 3 weeks! It was an amazing and invigorating, well needed vacation. I hadn’t been to Brazil in 15 years and I didn’t realize how much I had missed my roots. It was so hot there, with temperatures in the 40’s degree Celsius! The sun gave me the energy I needed for recovery and the laid back pace of being on holiday without schedules or worries relaxed me in a way I can’t remember last time I felt this light. But as with everything, vacations also come to an end. 

Now I’m back here in Burlington and the below zero temperature is really getting to me. Within a week of being back I’m already in so much pain again. I can’t even blame it on stress as I have nothing going on right now that is causing me stress. There is only one thing to blame; the weather! Once more I’m grateful that I ended up with a summer placement because I am always so much healthier when the weather is warmer. This way it will be a lot easier for me to cope with the demands of the placement, such as stress and tiredness, without the added physical challenges I experience in the winter.

I feel mentally rested after this holiday and am starting to get the itch to get involved in midwifery again. It is only end of January and I don’t start my placement until the end of April. What am I going to do for the next 3 months? I keep hearing from colleagues about them attending births and I can’t help but feel a little envy. I still have a lot to do before I feel ready to start placement and I have plans to do some more traveling too, but I do dream about how my experience in placement will be. How will I cope, will we manage as a family with the challenge of the kids being off school in the summer, but ultimately how will my body handle the physical demands of midwifery. My biggest fear is that this disease will get on the way of my dream of becoming a midwife. I worry that I will physically not be able to perform my chosen profession. Sometimes I feel I need to move to a place where it is summer all year round. But where could I go and still be able to work as a midwife? Midwifery does not exist in Brazil and for me to work there with pregnant women I would have to either be an obstetric nurse or an obstetrician. Here in Ontario we have an amazing structure for the midwifery profession. It is legislated and regulated, it is also funded by the government, and we are independent and self regulated profession. Sure there are many areas for improvement but compared to any where in the world we have it really good here. If I stayed here, would I be able to take all my vacation time in the winter, go somewhere warmer, and only come back when it is not so cold anymore? I feel so insecure right now. I always do when I’m in the middle of a fibromyalgia crisis. It’s like being in the middle of a blizzard where you can’t see an inch ahead of you and you feel lost and scared. Right now I feel like I’m the midst of this blizzard that is so cold and dark, like I’m never going to see the sun again. But wait a minute! It is cold and dark and I haven’t seen the sun since I came back from Brazil! No wonder! Anyways, probably next time you hear from me I will be in Brazil again for a last fix me up before placement and I’m sure you will hear a totally different tone to my writing.

The kids and I on our way back from the beach. This day it was 45C! My oldest son wasn't there that day.

View from the balcony where we were staying.

Hubby and I enjoying the beach!

And now time to enjoy a "chopp" (Brazilian draft beer)