Playing Catch: A Midwife's Memoirs
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Delivering a baby is not so much pulling it out as bending it down and back up again. There’s a shelf of bone above it (the mother’s symphysis pubis) and a bowl-shaped bone below (the sacrum and coccyx of the posterior pelvis), and its two little shoulders are wedged between those two bones. So you wiggle the baby downward to release the upper shoulder from behind the symphysis pubis, and then wiggle it upward to release the lower shoulder from the bowl of the sacrum and coccyx. Done properly, a baby should wiggle down, up and then in a round curve onto the mother’s belly quite naturally.
This is what I did with Sharlene’s baby. It’s a handy place to rest the baby for a minute, the mother’s belly, so you can suction and inspect the baby with no fear of dropping it. Before I could catch my breath, examine the baby’s genitalia, and inform her of what she had won, Sharlene’s voice rose up from beneath the paper drapes:
“Get that shit off me!”
I grabbed the baby back and yanked it to my chest protectively.
Marjorie gasped. I looked over at her. Her eyes, above her mask, welled up.
“It’s a girl,” I said weakly.
“Well, good!” the patient’s mother finally addressed Sharlene. “I hope some day she puts you through this exact same mess!”
And that was my tenth delivery.
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About the Book
What happens when a hip, thirtysomething journalist for a major metropolitan daily newspaper abandons her prestigious career to become a nurse-midwife?
Playing Catch: A Midwife’s Memoirs chronicles the adventures of Sarah Porter as she embarks on a career path awash in peril -- and body fluids. With fortitude, humor and a sarcastic, self-critical eye, Sarah weathers the humiliation of nursing school, lands smack in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic as a new nurse and is finally, painfully initiated into midwifery.
Told through Sarah’s eyes, Playing Catch is not a crunchy, saffron-colored look at midwifery. It is a gritty, sexy, hilarious take on the modern world of birthing babies. In the end, Sarah must decide whether the transcendence and satisfaction she experiences as a midwife outweigh the exhaustion, self-doubt and ethical dilemmas she faces daily.
About the Author
Sally Urang has been writing for more than 20 years. After receiving a B.A. in English literature, Sally worked at the New York Times as an assistant editor, creating graphics, captions and headlines. In that capacity, she also wrote various articles for the daily newspaper, Sunday edition and special sections. After eight years, she left journalism to pursue a career as a midwife. She has been a midwife for 15 years and has delivered more than 1,000 babies, but her love of writing has never wavered. She has published her work in a variety of journals, including Esquire and Ms., the Journal of Nurse-Midwifery, The Female Patient, Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality and Institutional Investor. She was a contributing author on The New Good Housekeeping Family Health and Medical Guide (Hearst Books). Her work has also been featured online in CBS Healthwatch, GymAmerica.com and MSN’s Pregnancy and Childcare Multimedia Health Information Services.