Hurry up and wait

Tonight I'm at the hospital waiting for a lady to deliver. She came into the clinic today with contractions. Normally we wouldn't have sent her down to deliver but she lives about an hour away. So, instead of her having to return in a few days, we decided to let her come down to the Labor and Delivery unit and see if we can't make her deliver a baby.

I've only been on the rotation a few days, but I've noticed that sometimes I do a lot of waiting. At other times, it's all-of-the-sudden an emergency. Today was a good example. We had a patient come in for an induction. We got her going and then went to clinic. This afternoon I got a call stating that the patient was getting ready so I better head down. I got to the floor quickly only to find that she wasn't quite ready. So, after a quick check, I decided to go out to the desk and talk with the nurses. Not 3 minutes later, there was a "Staff Emergency" code for her room. That basically means that the nurse thought she was about to deliver. I ran back into the room, got suited up, and waited. It still took about another hour to deliver the baby.

So, here I sit in L&D, waiting for a primip (that's a first-time mom) to progress. It's going to be a long night. In the meantime, I watch to see how much "Lots of space" there is on gmail. Right now there is 7209.791980 megabytes. And it keeps getting bigger! Plenty of room for emails.