Early "Happy Holidays"

An early Happy Holidays to everyone! T-minus 6 days until Christmas. Are you ready? My lights have been up for almost a month. My tree - up and decorated since before Thanksgiving. Shopping almost entirely done online. Going out and about this week to visit various family members, and will celebrate Christmas at home with just my immediately family.

AtYourCervix gets a break for Christmas

I can't believe that I managed to do this, but I am off both today and tomorrow.

SCORE!!!!!

I don't know if I've ever been off both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in my years as a nurse.

So, even though I won't be there to lovingly help little ones into the world, my fantastic co-workers will.

A moment of silence for all of the nurses working today and tomorrow.

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By the way, payback for these two nice days off will be hell. I'm working a ton of shifts in a row for the New Year's weekend, and will subsequently miss my big extended family get together for the holidays. ::sigh::

Happy Holidays everyone!

"I have to push!"

We had a very high proportion of women coming in with decreased fetal movement in the past several days. It's eerie really - what makes so many pregnant women realize that their babies haven't been moving as much during the holidays? Are they so busy with holiday preparations that they finally sit down at the end of the day and aren't sure if their babies have been moving?

Gratefully, every single woman who came in with decreased or no fetal movement had beautifully reactive NSTs. YEAH!!! No more bad babies! We had enough of them right before Christmas.

At one point, we had two women who delivered their babies at the exact same time. Thankfully, it wasn't for the same provider -- that could have been interesting. If that would have happened, we would have had the OB resident catch one of the babies. (Yes, it has happened before.)

One evening, a woman came in, looking to be in obvious acute distress. She was about 24 weeks and said she was pushing/had to push. This means one of two things: she is imminently going to deliver a preterm baby or her cervix is closed, thick and high. Guess which one she was? (Answer: she was sent home with antibiotics for a raging urinary tract infection.)