Birth announcement for birthing centre cat!

This morning at about 6:30am, I awoke to our resident pregnant kitty Jorshie meowing at the top of her lungs and wandering aimlessly around the house. Just a little bit of background: Jorshie arrived one day at the Bumi Sehat house full of midwives, totally pregnant, but too far along to get a kitty termination (said the vet). At first she didn't like anyone, but then warmed up quickly when the ladies here began feeding her, and soon enough she was spending most of her time sleeping in our laps! She's just a young kitty and was so skinny when I first got here!

So, the next thing that happened was that I fed her some leftover Kraft dinner which Tanya had made the night before and was apparently really gross because milk in 30 degrees heat is just not milk... She ate about half a cup of the stuff in 30 seconds but was still meowing away. So after putting the Kraft dinner back in the fridge and getting electrocuted by it (this is what happens with our fridge, in particular if you are not wearing shoes and standing in a puddle of water), I strolled back up the stairs to my bed. Kitty followed me up, hung out in my bed for awhile but kept getting restless and sliding out under the mosquito net. I went back downstairs, gave her more Kraft dinner, then as I was in my puzzled and half-awakened state and heading back up the stairs again with her meowing at my feet, I ran into Tanya in the hallway. She was asking me to go to the dome to assess a woman with ruptured membranes who had just come in. She asked me if the kitty was in labour, and I said, 'no, she's ok, she's just acting weird!', then as luck would have it, her water broke on the floor in the hallway! And so it all began... While I attended to a labouring woman at the dome, Tanya sat with Jorshie as she delivered her 3 kittens! Unfortunately one kitten died right after the birth, but the other two survived and are super cute! And as some of you might know, my midwife career began attending cat deliveries so this was a blast from the past...

The lady who came into the dome delivered her baby (her 2nd) roughly an hour after she got there, once again in Haitian multip style, by having only 30min total of contractions. Finally a baby girl was born, we've had so many boys in the past few weeks. Too bad we couldn't just spend the rest of the day sitting around with the new kittens and staring at them, but it's been only Tanya and I doing all of the clinics and all of the births for the past few days since Amy left, so we had to do a FULL day of prenatal visits today in the extra scorching heat. The volunteers coming in the coming months are going to have to be hard workers, because we have roughly 20-30 due dates each month right now, and many women who just walk in in labour for care.

My other stories of the past few days involve cutting off an extra digit off a baby's hand... (yes, there are photos, and yes, the baby was fine! And for the record, Tanya did the cutting, I just gave her emotional support and did the photography). And the other story is the pretty much 20 hours that I spent with a 19-year old having her first baby, and sadly she decided to go to the hospital in the middle of the night while we were sleeping because she was just too tired to go and wanted an augment. I had spent the entire day with her and when I went to take a break, she cried because she didn't want me to leave. We didn't speak the same language, but somehow we had managed to connect... I spent a good part of the night with her when I came back from my break, rubbing her back with every single contraction, until it seemed like her contractions had slowed and it would be ok for us to sleep. This morning she was gone :-( Maybe I'll make a trip to St. Michel to see if she is doing alright.

I'll admit I am getting to be a bit sacked... probably a combination of being at a billion births in Canada just before leaving to come here, then going to something like 14 births in the 2.5 weeks that I've been here. Only 3 more days... wow, it's going to be really wild to be home. I can predict now how it's going to feel to be home - all of this will so easily seem like a dream.

Hope everyone out there is doing well back home. Hope Julia and Sarah and their new babies are doing amazingly. And congrats to Sarah in Campbell River for having her baby girl too!

Births all around.