Why obstetrician? Interview about the profession: obstetrician

“I love my job and I’m still proud of my profession. What could be better when mothers walk around the maternity hospital with smiles on their faces?”

And also midwife of the highest qualification category Elena Kardashyan loves to travel. Her family is all girls - mother, sister and nieces. Moreover, the majority are from March. My mother was born on March 8, my eldest niece was born on the 7th, and two more grandchildren were born on March 4 and 5. By the way, midwife Elena Vladimirovna delivered all her nephews with her own hands.

First man

In her work book there is only one entry about employment, made 23 years ago. The personnel officer laughs: “A copy of the employment record? There’s nothing to film!”

Even when I was in school, I worked in community service as a nurse in maternity hospital No. 1,” says Elena Vladimirovna. — And I fell in love with the profession of midwife at the age of 14! Therefore, I immediately entered medical school. Did you know that the word “midwife” translated from French means “standing by the bed”? This is probably why men are not hired for this specialty.

The practice took place at our second maternity hospital. The first time we, eight girls, came to the maternity ward, the midwife carefully examined us and for some reason chose me: “Come on, you will assist me!” I washed my hands and went, neither alive nor dead from excitement. It was scary, but very interesting! And I immediately realized that I was not mistaken with my profession.

Then Deputy Chief Physician for Obstetrics and Gynecology Vera Pavlovna Karpenko told me: “When you graduate from college, come here, to us!”

I was also lucky with my teachers: Alexandra Nikolaevna Novikova taught us obstetrics and instilled in us not only a love for the profession, but also cleanliness and decency in relation to work and to women in labor. In general, starting with appearance (look neat, tidy, fit and friendly, no frowning face!) and ending with high professionalism down to the smallest detail. The midwife must have the highest qualifications: she is the first person whose hands welcome a new person into the world!

According to Kamchatstat, in 2015, 2,430 babies were born in the regional center, which is 2 babies or 0.1% more than in the previous year. According to estimates as of January 1, 2016, the population of the Kamchatka Territory was 316.5 thousand people, having decreased by 789 people over the year. The decrease in the region's population is due to migration outflow (1,314 people). The natural population increase was 525 people.

By the way, in our profession, physical strength is an important component. During your shift you will bend down so many times, support, help a woman get up and lie down, deliver a baby - and all with your hands. You get so wet that you can’t feel your limbs. You spend the day on your feet, hardly sitting down. Plus the emotional and mental load - after all, we have two lives in our hands, a mother’s and a child’s. But it happens that they give birth two or three times in a row. It used to be, in the second half of the 90s, when the birth rate began to fall sharply, one or two women gave birth per day, and it happened that the duty went without giving birth at all. And now, on average, there are 6-7 births, sometimes up to 10 per shift at normal times, and if the first maternity hospital is closed for prevention, then it can reach 18. When should I sit here?

I have worked in all positions, and if necessary, I can replace any midwife, even a senior one. But a leadership position is not for me. After all, I worked as a senior midwife for two years and wrote an application - back to the post.

Absolutely positive

- Were there any critical situations during childbirth?

Of course, but most of them ended well. We saved women with bleeding and other labor disorders. The specificity of our work is that you never know what will happen. It happens that a woman was seen by a gynecologist, the entire pregnancy proceeded normally, but it all ends in pathology. But we have a very close-knit team, a team of professionals, we understand each other at a glance, in critical situations everyone knows what to do and acts quickly, everything is worked out to the smallest detail.

In physiological childbirth, our task is not to interfere! Childbirth occurs on its own, nature has worked out everything wisely. We only teach a woman to push, advise her on how to behave, how to breathe.

I think that every midwife should be given a diploma in psychology. After all, women coming to us are afraid. For yourself, for the child. Especially for the first time: they had never experienced such pain as during childbirth in their lives. Calming and setting up for a successful outcome is one of our most important tasks. It is no secret that some women come with a negative attitude - unfortunately, the attitude towards medicine in society has not been the most favorable lately.

The midwife should reassure the woman and set her up for a favorable outcome. Photo: Shutterstock.com

- Yes, there are enough critical arrows in your direction...

You know, if satisfied women, of whom there are many more, wrote in the media about their impressions, the attitude in society would be different! But the paradox is that happy people have no time for this. One woman recently came to me for her third child and said an invaluable phrase: “I gave birth to you in 2009 for the first time, and only because of you I decided to give birth again. Thank you for your attentive and sincere attitude!” And many women, when they give birth, tell us: “You are real wizards!”

Obstetrics is one of the areas of medicine that is absolutely positive. Because the torment ends with the appearance of a screaming toddler and the woman experiences happiness and joy. And we rejoice with her!

Blue and pink

- Where do the first minutes of life begin?

- I treat the newborn’s umbilical cord, wipe it with a sterile napkin and take it to the doctor: in the first minutes he is examined by a neonatologist. We measure chest and head circumference, height, weight. Everything is recorded and recorded on tags that are attached to the child’s hand. Girls have pink tags, boys have blue tags.

For two hours after giving birth, a woman lies in the delivery room - this period is considered the most crucial and dangerous, when complications can arise. And the baby is next to the mother: immediately after birth we put it on her stomach, she puts the baby to her chest.

In general, the trend now is to move closer to natural childbirth, with only pain relief, a minimum of stimulation and medications. Each woman in labor has a heart monitor, and we monitor the condition of the baby and mother every minute. And before there was only a stethoscope. But we still have sleepless nights...

- At what time of day are babies born most often?

A woman's pituitary gland produces the hormone oxytocin. Its production peaks at 4 am. Therefore, most often women “want” to give birth early in the morning. In general - at any time of the day when the mother’s body gives the command. And no one knows this time.

With a smile through life

- Over the many years in your obstetric practice there have probably been unexpected situations. Would you like to share?

Our heaviest boy was born three years ago, weighing five three hundred. What’s surprising is that the woman gave birth to the hero herself, without any complications. And there were babies less than a kilogram, they were then nursed in the children's department, in the intensive care ward.

I remember once a woman from the coast gave birth to twins. At about one o'clock in the morning the first girl was born, six minutes later the second. Both weigh more than two kilograms. I look at them - two absolutely identical girls are lying there. This is so unusual - double happiness and a miracle!

Double Happiness! Photo: Elena Akhremenko

And one day in winter they brought a woman in an ambulance - they called and knocked. The doctor and I went downstairs, and she was already giving birth, she couldn’t bear it. They delivered the baby right in the car, on a stretcher: a large boy, about four kilograms. I took the child in my arms and carried him to the delivery room on the first floor, and the mother onto a stretcher. Everything ended well!

Do you know what's surprising? Babies are all born beautiful! The little people are so cute!

- Do you have enough personnel?

The youth are not coming! They are afraid of difficulties and responsibility. Now young people are looking for something easier and cheaper. It seems to me that it makes sense to return to the distribution system after medical school, so that they work for at least three years! Otherwise, soon there will be no one to work at all.

- You are a very smiling woman. Is it natural or professional?

This is my credo. I smile and will smile! No matter how hard it is...

Elena Vladimirovna KARDASHIAN. Born on December 11, 1973 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. She graduated from the Petropavlovsk Medical School with a degree in midwife. Work experience in the specialty - 23 years.

In 1964, a young French obstetrician barely escaped responsibility for. A friend offered him samples of a new drug that affects consciousness. And Michel Oden tried to give very small doses of this drug to women in labor. The results were amazing. “The women seemed to lose their minds, they screamed in the corridors, pulled catheters out of their veins, scared the midwives... but the child was born immediately! “But since such behavior was “unacceptable in a medical institution,” Auden quietly stopped his behavior and never spoke about it.

Understandably, given that this drug, GHB (gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, or gamma-hydroxybutyric acid), is notorious as a “date-rape drug,” that is, a drug that, when given to a person, can cause him to lose control of himself. Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid promotes the release of the hormone oxytocin and in the case of these women (by the way, whether THEY knew about the experiment, Auden does not say...) broke down the cultural barriers that separated the woman from her quickly giving birth foremothers.

Auden suggested that champagne speeds up labor because it also contains the inhibition-releasing gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. On the one hand, I would love to see this book, which, as the author hints, may be the swan song of this wonderful writer and thinker advocating the use of GBH in birth block instead of synthetic oxytocin.

Just imagine the results! (Not to mention the safety issues of keeping such a drug under lock and key from various perverts, of which I think there are plenty in every major teaching hospital...). It is enough that the hypothesis of such a high authority as Auden allows us doulas to consider a bottle of champagne in a doula bag to be no less important than, for example, Crocs...

Since the early 60s, Auden has been trying to explain that human society is the main enemy of childbirth, because we cannot help but interfere. Only by suppressing the “thinking brain,” the cortex, can a woman regain the ability of our foremothers - to give birth easily and quickly. In primitive societies, women are allowed to give birth themselves, with an experienced assistant waiting at some distance, but for thousands of years we have preferred to do exactly the opposite.

And quite often (more often than we would like) we discover that we did everything wrong. Auden reminds us that just recently, terribly recently, doctors discovered that babies physically need to be close to their mothers immediately after birth, and not in the children's ward.

We shaved women's crotches, gave them enemas, wiped their nipples with alcohol before they offered their breasts to a child, and now it turns out that these microbes, it turns out, are needed by babies! (And, the author might add, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence recently informed us that decades of immediate cord clamping and cutting were depriving newborns of up to 30% of their natural blood volume.)

Women today, on average, labor three hours longer than women of the same age, weight and height 60 years ago. Many women who have not had very successful births pass on, thanks to the spread of cesarean sections, this “inability to give birth” to their daughters, thus the proportion of women who cannot give birth without help in the literal sense of the word is also growing in our society. At the same time, we are moving further and further away from the ability to experience what Auden called the “fetal expulsion reflex.”

As I discovered in my time studying with Auden, his ideas, given in a large perspective, cannot always be applied “here and now.” Yes, I wholeheartedly accept the fact that a woman should turn off her cerebral cortex and allow her subcortex to turn on. But for the anxious, rational thirty-year-old business women whose births I accompany, such a shutdown of the cortex is rarely possible (this is also why I mastered the Hypnobirthing technique).

Dr. Oden spends a lot of time studying the possible long-term consequences of medical interventions in childbirth for humanity... Recently, by the way, a prominent American lawyer specializing in “medical” cases admitted to me that Pitocin (an American analogue of synthetic oxytocin) brought him more income than any other intervention during childbirth, since this drug is the cause of a huge number of birth injuries, including brain injuries.

It would be great to learn from the book Auden's opinion on this matter. Instead, Oden is interested in less-than-credible research suggesting a link between C-sections, oxytocin and autism.

Autism is a relatively recent diagnosis. Its wording in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the “psychiatrists' bible,” was changed again in 2013. And, as far as we understand, it can be changed more than once. There is also an opinion that there is a hereditary predisposition to autism. Thus, I have no confidence in the connection of such an unstudied condition as autism with cesarean section or induction of labor. Auden rightly warns about the phenomenon of “dead-end research”: the conclusions of a study are so socially unacceptable that the researcher practically buries his work. On the other hand, many questions about autism are still waiting to be answered, and in this situation it is inappropriate to point fingers...

For doulas, Auden's ideal birth scenario looks wonderful: a woman gives birth alone (without a midwife or with an unnoticed and uninvolved midwife; and no man!), in a dark room. But for many of our clients, this description resembles torture: locked in a dark closet, accompanied by the ominous tricoteuse (tricoteuse (French) - knitter; an allusion to famous characters of the era of the Great French Revolution - women who were present with knitting at the meetings of the Convention, the Revolutionary Tribunal and at the foot of guillotine during numerous public executions; under the monarchy, knitting was considered low labor, and “knitter” was a humiliating nickname; the new regime gave women many rights, crossing out the old prohibitions, including the right to “take part in the meetings of the Commune and knit,” - approx. .trans.), silently knitting in the corner. This is not what our culture believes “birth support” looks like.

Auden also puts the icing on the cake of his birth scenario: If a woman cannot give birth within a certain time, then, he explains, an emergency caesarean section is a better choice than continuing painful contractions with more and more interventions. It's knife time!

I understand this very well. Every week I read birth stories from either women in my courses or clients of my colleagues, in which the woman (and her cervix!) was subjected to one drug after another, while the woman was chained to a monitor and an IV for hours, and her body was tortured experienced shock after shock - and all this only in order to “avoid a Caesarean.”

On the other hand, it is difficult for me to imagine women who can really give birth under the conditions proposed by Auden. Where can I find a woman who will turn off her cerebral cortex so well that she will be able to give birth alone in a dark room and “on another planet”, AT THE SAME TIME KNOWING that somewhere a clock is ticking, measuring the time after which she will be taken to the operating room for abdominal surgery? Definitely not where I live.

Michelle Oden has a strong influence on everyone who is thinking about physiological, but at the same time safe childbirth. However, I often find his theories more educational than practical. Women aren't that stupid. Man easily learned to be afraid. Unlearning... that's a completely different story.

So we have forgotten how to give birth, as Auden believes? - I ask myself.

Many women give birth under roughly the same conditions, and most of them, unless they are too young, emaciated, or have undergone female circumcision, succeed. Most women don't have access to a nice, clean operating room at their neighborhood hospital. All they need are well-trained and supportive midwives; Women need accessible health care, but they also need universal childbirth information that teaches women about their ability to give birth.
And yes, we still need Dr. Auden, even if that voice is Cassandra's, grimly prophesying our future doom. May Auden continue to amaze and sometimes infuriate us for many, many years to come!

An obstetrician is a specialist who helps women during pregnancy and childbirth. There are two types of specialists in this profession: simply an obstetrician and an obstetrician-gynecologist. These are not just different names, but a range of responsibilities and capabilities of a physician. A simple obstetrician provides moral support to patients and delivers newborns. The doctor performs surgical interventions, monitors the birth process and applies stitches.

Story

The development of obstetrics is closely related to the development of medicine. Ancient writings mention birth processes and actions during them. But until the 13th century, this area of ​​medical knowledge was often neglected, relegated to the background. Hippocrates was the first to study and describe in detail the process of birth and its components, devoting an entire section to it.

But over time, obstetrics did not advance much. It reached a particular decline in the dark times of the Middle Ages. Everything was subordinated to the church, and any attempts at healing were equated with the machinations of the devil and were punishable by burning at the stake. At that time, midwives acted as assistants during childbirth, who often became the culprits of injury and death of the newborn or mother. For quite a long time, obstetricians were exclusively women, but in Ancient Greece they also resorted to the help of men. This was done in later times, but only in the most extreme cases.

Only in the 16th century did obstetrics begin to be classified as a separate branch. At this time, the first manual on it with sketches is created. This is the start of a new era and the beginning of the development of obstetrics as a separate component of medicine as a whole. Nowadays, labor activity has been studied almost completely. Modern technologies, combined with the constantly developing and expanding knowledge of doctors, have made childbirth as safe as possible, and the profession of an obstetrician prestigious and in demand. After all, it is these specialists who help bring a new life into the world and significantly facilitate the birth process for the woman in labor.

Description

Obstetrics is a rather complex branch of medical knowledge. Despite a rather limited range of activities, this specialist is constantly faced with potentially dangerous processes. Obstetricians can work in two areas:

• An obstetrician is a mid-level medical worker. To obtain a diploma, it is enough to graduate from college. The main responsibilities of a specialist are psychological and physical preparation for childbirth. Also, if necessary, this specialist receives the child, while the doctor performs other procedures necessary for a successful delivery.
• An obstetrician-gynecologist is already a specialist with a higher medical education, a certified doctor. He knows everything not only about the birth process, but about its pathologies and complications. This specialist guides the pregnant woman from her first visit to the doctor until her discharge from the hospital. The range of his responsibilities includes constant monitoring of the condition of the expectant mother, timely assistance in the event of toxicosis (especially in the last trimester), management of childbirth, and performing all necessary actions for the successful completion of the process. This includes surgery and suturing.

An obstetrician is one of the most significant professions in medicine. After all, with the help of this specialist, each of us was born.

What specialties to study to become an obstetrician?

To become an obstetrician, you must choose one of the following specializations:

• Medicine.
• Obstetrics and gynecology.
• Midwifery (for colleges).

All these specialties will allow you to get a job in a maternity hospital and take part in the emergence of a new life.

What do you have to do at work and specializations?

The work of an obstetrician is quite difficult and stressful. When choosing this specialty, you should remember that you will work around the clock, because childbirth does not know a time frame.

The daily responsibilities of an obstetrician include:

• Examination of pregnant women and women in labor. Checking blood pressure, body temperature, weight, swelling, measuring abdominal circumference, height of the uterine fundus and checking its tone by palpation. The obstetrician also listens to the fetal heartbeat.
• Carrying out Doppler ultrasound as prescribed by a doctor.
• Collection of material for analysis. Usually these are smears on the flora.
• Preparing for childbirth. This is a range of examination procedures, to which psychological assistance is added.
• Constant monitoring of the condition of the mother and fetus during contractions, monitoring their intensity and frequency.
• If it is impossible for a gynecologist to attend the birth, delivery of the fetus.
• Conducting an initial examination and measuring the weight and height of the newborn. The obstetrician attaches a clothespin to the umbilical cord and treats it.
• Checking the integrity of the placenta in the postpartum period.

Also, an obstetrician with secondary education performs a number of equally important procedures every day.

In addition to the above, the following responsibilities have been added to the range of activities of an obstetrician-gynecologist:

• Surgical delivery by Caesarean section.
• Carrying out other surgical interventions.
• Performing specific procedures during childbirth that require high qualifications. This is turning the fetus, establishing a vacuum, forceps, or using the squeezing technique.
• Squeezing the uterus to contract it.
• Sutures for ruptures.
• Prescribing the necessary medications.

In addition, an obstetrician-gynecologist can perform a number of prenatal procedures and surgeries. Only a highly qualified doctor can manage premature or pathological births.

Who is the obstetrician profession suitable for?

The main criterion for a good obstetrician is resistance to stress. Childbirth is a difficult process for both mother and child. The result is almost impossible to predict. The ability to quickly make the right decisions and a good memory - this golden combination will help save more than one life.

An obstetrician must have a certain physical strength and steadiness of hands. After all, you will be holding a fragile newborn, who is so important to receive correctly and not drop.

Self confidence. It is because of the obstetrician's lack of confidence that accidents and negligence often occur.

Attention to details. Even the slightest deviation from the norm should attract attention.

Demand

This profession is in high demand. Both in maternity hospitals and private clinics, new personnel or already experienced specialists are always required.

How much do people working as obstetricians earn?

Your salary directly depends on your level of qualification: you are just an obstetrician or an obstetrician-gynecologist. On average, the salary ranges from 33-41 thousand rubles per month.

Is it easy to get a job as an obstetrician?

It's easy to get a job. Obtaining a medical education requires mandatory practice. Already here you can prove yourself, thereby ensuring a decent workplace.

To apply to a private clinic, you will need experience and recommendations. You will be assessed on various parameters. Only the best are hired into such structures.

How does a career as an obstetrician usually work?

For an obstetrician, getting a promotion is quite difficult. After all, to do this, you should start with higher education and retrain as an obstetrician-gynecologist. Only after this can we talk about the manager’s career growth and ambitions. You can grow to become the head of the maternity or gynecological department. As a result, this allows you to get closer to the position of chief physician.

Prospects for the obstetrician profession

The profession of an obstetrician is quite promising. It opens up a lot of development opportunities for the owner. You can obtain a higher medical education, which will make you not a secondary employee, but a leading specialist. The diploma provides the opportunity to conduct private practice. After receiving the qualification “obstetrician-gynecologist”, you can apply for the chair of the head of the department. This is the prospect of becoming a chief physician or getting a position in the Ministry of Health.

Obstetrician and midwife - not all expectant mothers know the difference between these two main assistants during childbirth. Some women believe that during childbirth everything depends on the doctor, others - that on the professionalism of the midwife. In fact, the work of each specialist is important during childbirth, but we will tell you in more detail what each of them does.

Obstetrician-gynecologist: who is he?

An obstetrician (or, to put it correctly, an obstetrician-gynecologist) is a doctor. He studied at a medical institute for six years, that is, he has a higher medical education, then for another two years he studied in the specialty of obstetrics and gynecology. And only after this the doctor has the right to begin official work. By the way, a doctor can have many specializations: some deal only with gynecology (female diseases of the genital organs), others help women get pregnant if there are problems with this (reproductologists), and others help carry a pregnancy to term (miscarriage specialist). There are obstetricians-gynecologists who only manage pregnancy (in a antenatal clinic or medical clinic), but do not attend childbirth. And there are doctors who work in a maternity hospital (for example, in the pathology department or in the postpartum department) and at the same time attend births (on duty or under contract).

Obstetrician at childbirth

During childbirth, the obstetrician has his own job: he controls the entire process, and only he decides what and how to do next. To be specific, the doctor regularly examines the woman in labor, prescribes examinations, evaluates their results, and determines the tactics of labor management. That is, he monitors the entire course of labor. Many manipulations are also performed only by the doctor: he opens the amniotic sac, performs an episiotomy (perineal incision), sutures ruptures after childbirth, and performs manual separation of the placenta. And of course, the obstetrician-gynecologist leading the birth performs a cesarean section. After childbirth, the doctor also has a lot of work: he assesses the degree of blood loss, decides whether any medical prescriptions and medications are needed. Then the doctor determines when the mother should be transferred to the postpartum ward, when she can get up, what to eat and, finally, when the woman can be discharged from the hospital. It turns out that during childbirth and after it, the obstetrician is the most important among all medical workers.

Midwife - who is this?

The word "midwife" comes from the French accoucheur, which literally translates as “one who stands by the bed,” and its modern meaning is an assistant during childbirth. But one should not confuse a midwife with the now fashionable doulas or so-called spiritual midwives. Unlike a midwife, a doula does not provide medical assistance; her work is more aimed at moral and psychological support. By the way, they study to become a doula for only a few months, and sometimes even online. A midwife is a specialist with secondary medical education. This specialty is obtained at a medical college and studies to become a midwife for three or four years. And the work of a midwife during childbirth is no less serious and important than that of a doctor.

Midwife - what does she do?

As soon as a woman enters the maternity ward, the midwife, with or without a doctor, examines the woman in labor and determines what stage the labor process is at. Then the main medical task of the midwife is to constantly watch how the cervix is ​​dilating and check where the baby’s head is. The midwife will inform the doctor about all these changes. The midwife should also measure the mother’s blood pressure and pulse and, if necessary, carry out any doctor’s orders: for example, give injections or install a CTG machine. By the way, the midwife does not have the right to independently decide how the birth will take place or prescribe any medical procedures - all this is up to the doctor.

Another important task of the midwife, and the doctor too, is to calm and support her if she is having a hard time with contractions, to explain what is happening to her and the baby. And the obstetrician and midwife can tell you how to breathe correctly or restrain your efforts, how to find a comfortable position to endure contractions.

If there are several births going on at once in a maternity hospital, then the midwife is forced to constantly approach one woman in labor, then another. She simply does not have time for psychological support or time to provide medical assistance! That is why you can often hear that a woman saw a midwife only immediately at the moment of birth of the child (at this time the midwife is always next to the mother)

Birth of a child

In the second stage of labor, the midwife performs her most important job: she directly controls the process of the birth of the child. She tells mom when to push and when to hold back, this is the time when the midwife is in charge of the birth. And to ensure that the head does not move forward too quickly and forcefully, the midwife holds it with her hand, thereby protecting the perineum from damage. During the birth of the child, the midwife carefully, and then, after birth, helps the baby turn around and release his shoulders.

The woman in labor hardly pays attention to the routine medical procedures performed by the midwife during labor (at this time she simply has no time for it); the other work of the midwife is much more significant for her

Important little things

After the baby is born, the midwife places clamps on the umbilical cord and cuts it (if the father is present at the birth, he can do this). According to tradition, the midwife shows the baby to the mother, asking: “Who is born?” After this, the baby is placed on the mother's chest, and then transferred to the changing table for treatment. And here again there is work for the midwife: she washes the baby with warm water, removes blood, mucus, meconium and wipes the baby with a warm sterile diaper. Then he places a staple on the umbilical cord and cuts off the rest of the umbilical cord. While the neonatologist assesses the condition of the newborn, the midwife, together with the obstetrician-gynecologist, monitors the birth of the placenta, then the obstetrician looks to see if there are any parts of the placenta left in the uterus, and the midwife weighs and measures the “baby place”. But, again, all these medical manipulations of the obstetrician and midwife go unnoticed for the mother herself, she simply does not see them.

And finally, the doctor and the midwife monitor the mother’s condition for two hours after the end of labor to prevent possible bleeding.

A woman has the right to know what medical procedures are being performed on her. She can always ask the doctor or midwife what this or that prescription is for and whether it can be replaced with something

As we can see, the obstetrician and midwife of the maternity ward are truly top-class professionals - they manage to monitor the condition of both mother and baby and at the same time help them. Each of them does their job, and together they are a real team!

Photo - photobank Lori

Midwives at the antenatal clinic During a shift they can run 10 km around the maternity hospital. A random person will not stay in this profession for long - after the first birth they see, they refuse; observing someone else’s pain is very difficult and scary. What a nervous system you need to have!

What does a midwife do?

1. A midwife is a person with medical education, and her task is not just to hold a woman's hand during childbirth. She sews up tears in the most intimate places and has knowledge not only about the female body, but also about the body of a baby.

   The most difficult thing, admits a midwife with 30 years of work experience, is to help a mother survive the death of her baby, to support her in every possible way.
   

2. Many people wonder where does the placenta go. Now the woman in labor can take it away, but I wonder what it was like in Soviet times.

   The placenta was stored in special refrigerators and then transferred to France for the production of cosmetic products.
   
   

3. There was no one close to me during the birth, and for several hours after that. Now many people prefer joint births. Midwives are sometimes surprised by the choice of women in labor: women even choose their father-in-law as their birth partner!

   Watching people become parents and realize this is no less exciting than being present at the miracle of childbirth. A man's face changes its expression forever when he realizes that he has become a dad.
   
   

4. Now you won't surprise anyone dark-skinned child, even if both parents are white. All because of maternal relatives, ancestors that few people know about... Even a distant Uzbek relative can influence the fact that a child of color will be born.
   
   
5. The death of a mother during childbirth is a rare case; children die, and most often it is associated with some kind of congenital pathology.

   An anomaly such as a sixth finger on a hand or toe is not so scary and is much more common than we used to think. It is usually cut off before the baby is one year old.
   
   

6. Every child is beautiful in their own way! Working as a midwife, it is impossible not to admire the beauty of babies, each of which is unique. Very funny are babies who are born with hair, like dandelions.
   
   
7. In the elevator, on the stairs of the maternity hospital, in the toilet... Wherever women give birth! A midwife needs to be creative in order to deliver a baby in an unusual situation. The main thing is that it is comfortable for the woman in labor.
   
   
8. Very often, a midwife drives annoying relatives away from a pregnant woman or a woman who has just given birth. They don't understand that she needs peace!
   
9. Surprisingly, young women in labor give birth very easily and calmly. Over many years of practice, the midwife sees both 12-year-old and 13-year-old mothers.
   
   
10. Premature birth very difficult, but for kids most often it ends well.
    
    
11. This kind of work is a huge responsibility. How many tears befall an ordinary midwife! But when you see how happy parents are with their baby, you want to return to the workplace again and again.
    
    
12. The busiest time is in the fall. All because someone had a good time during the New Year holidays!
    
    
13. Dismissal, trial, violence from relatives - an ordinary midwife can be subjected to all this. This is a dangerous profession!

    Regardless of the risks, the midwife comes to work, which can be compared to the activities of a heavenly angel. So much really depends on her!