Midwife Mondays 153: Last week on placement

Three years of training and last week was my last ever week as a student midwife! Eek!

It was quite a bitty week really. I had three shifts, but as I wasn’t really priority as I’d already got my 40th catch, and just needed the hours, I ended up doing quite a bit of the odd jobs and things that get done on the birth unit.

My first shift I arrived to the whole unit being full of postnatal women – they’d had a really busy night the night before and so everyone needed postnatal care, NIPE checks, breastfeeding support and then discharging. I did see in a labouring woman, and settled her in, but as she had already met one of the other midwives on the unit earlier that morning, it was better for her continuity if the other midwife took over care again so I stepped back.

My second shift was a really oddly quiet one, where, again there was mostly just postnatal women and one woman in the very early stages of labour; so I helped out as much as possible and before I knew it my shift was done!

My final shift was always going to be a short shift as I needed to head up to uni to submit my final paperwork after my shift before the office closed. They’d had another really busy night the night before and so as I arrived I was asked, with my mentor, to take over in theatre where they were finishing up a forceps delivery. We took handover from the midwife from the night staff, and took over care of this woman, her husband and her newborn son as they transferred her to recovery. Within an hour we weren’t needed any more and we were heading back down to the birth centre.

After another couple of hours my mentor signed my hours book and told me to head off; there wasn’t anything coming in to the unit and I only had another hour or so to go anyway.

So, I headed to the car and drove out of the car park for the last time. I’m going to be working at a completely new hospital (full post on interviews and things coming in a couple of weeks) so it was a weird feeling to be leaving for the last time; knowing that I won’t be working there again after spending three years almost living there!

From the hospital I drove up to the university and handed in the final bit of paperwork; the book I’ve carried around for three years, tracking all my births, antenatal and postnatal checks, baby checks and all the other things we need to achieve to qualify! It was quite nerve-racking to hand it in actually, and I definitely took photos of every place before I did, just in case it got lost on the way to being checked! Better safe than sorry, eh?!

After that it was just a case of driving home, and after a quick accidental nap, going for a well-earned gin and tonic!

Its weird to think that is it. Its not been easy and there have been times when it really has been a proper challenge; but I did it!

I’ve got a lot of people to thank and a lot to look back on, so I’ll do that properly in another post, but for now I just wanted to say thank you to each and every one of you for following my journey, for your words of encouragement, for your positivity, and for coming back week on week to read what I’ve been up to in this amazing journey!

Image by Kelly Sikkema

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