If you are a labor doula, nurse, obstetrician or hospital based midwife and you read the title of this blog, you know that graham crackers and saltines mean an all night birth!
So how do we do it?
How do we get into bed after a long full day, fall asleep for 6 minutes, get woken up by a phone call, hop out of bed, get in the car and work all night on no sleep?
We just do it.
The mom is doing it too. If she can do it, we can too.
And so we keep ourselves going the best we can. We stay hydrated and we keep the coffee flowing. When we step away from our laboring client for a brief moment to get her more ice or something else she may need, we grab another cup of coffee for ourselves.
In many hospitals, there is a little stash of crackers in the kitchen. Usually they are there for a mom who can’t take medicine on an empty stomach but on a long night, they become fair game! Those crackers are what keep us all going. When it’s 3am and we are exhausted and the acid feels like it’s burning a hole straight through our stomachs… we reach for a cracker.
In the many years that I have been doing this work, I have had the occasion to share a short visit over a graham cracker in the kitchen with a nurse, doctor, midwife or anesthesiologist.
I must tell you that I work with some awesome nurses, doctors, midwives and anesthesiologists.
They care about their patients physically AND emotionally and they are deliberate...Read more