This week was exhausting. On Monday, we were in class from 8:00 to 16:30, with travel between campuses during our lunch break. On Tuesday, it was from 8:00 to 17:00. Both days were long. By the time we reached our classes on Wednesday, 8:00 to 15:00, we were all a little bit burnt out from listening, and having a lot of trouble staying focused on our instructors.

I also received my placement roster this week, which means that I know my schedule for the next few months! Now to find a job that works around my heavy schedule. Today, I’m off to visit the hospital with another student who was placed with me. We are hoping to explore a little bit, figure out the trains, and get to know the area so that we know what to expect when we go for our orientation in a couple of weeks.

Biology: we had our first Anatomy practical lab this week. It was incredible! We didn’t really know what to expect, and it was a little bit chaotic as there were 3 other labs happening at the same time. We filed into the underground room wearing clean lab coats and safety goggles, all a little bit uncomfortable with our new costumes. We stood around lab benches, each with a plastic bag on top. I looked at a nearby bench and realized that under their plastic bag was a hand. A human hand!

We were not really prepared for the fact that this anatomy prac was going to be an examination of cadavers. It was only an examination; we weren’t dissecting any of the specimens, but it was very strange and felt very invasive. The specimens only had muscle and skeletal tissue, everything else had been removed. I was uncomfortable with the way that the specimens were being handled by some of the lab aids, and I would have liked a small-group debrief afterward, as I don’t want to normalize death for science.

That being said, seeing the specimens sparked an interest. After spending a few hours in the lab, I did feel a lot more comfortable with the content, and a bit passionate about it where I previously had not. It helped me to relate the heavy lecture material to the career that I have chosen.

Aside from that, we finished neurobiology this week (and will have a prac next week to look at some brains and nervous systems), and moved back to cellular physiology. Lots of reading, lots of studying to do over the weekend.

Clinical-Based Learning: In our CBL this week, we looked at documentation and handover techniques. It was a little bit dry, and not very hands-on. Understandable, because notation is not a very active thing to learn. Strangely, it related quite closely to my experience in a call center from a few years before. Every single interaction with a customer had to be noted in their file, using professional and objective language that clearly states what they want and what we provided. Hospital notation is not much different, although it will need to be handwritten, and involves a lot of acronyms. Handover is similar to a call transfer – when staff is taking over for us we must advise them of what happened on the shift, what each patient is doing, and what we recommend for future. All fairly common sense stuff, but it was nice to have a refresher. It’s the sort of thing that we won’t learn properly until we are actually on the ward.

Inquiry-Based Learning: This week’s IBL was also a little bit dry. We had done some reading about the discomforts of pregnancy to prepare, and were asked to speak to friends and family who had been pregnant to hear their experiences. I didn’t reach out to anybody, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of many friends’ pregnancies, and taken an interest in their symptoms. We talked about the ways that discomforts can be managed, what the midwives can do, and what student midwives can do to alleviate some of the stress. Then, we split into small groups, were assigned symptoms, and did some research about the treatments available. The instructors didn’t provide a clear expectation that they wanted us to look for academic sources and cite information about the symptoms, instead recommending us to “google it”… then when we were presenting, they were annoyed that we hadn’t cited our sources. It was a good learning opportunity, and I’m learning to cite APA style, rather than the CMS style that I’m used to.

It seems as though they’re trying to interest us in research careers alongside our clinical practice, or following a clinical career. This is understandable, as the people teaching us have almost all left clinical practice in order to pursue research. It’s a very important field, as midwifery research is really lacking (there are only a few academic journals that I’ve been able to find that focus on maternal and fetal health). It’s a long and arduous process, and very difficult to research pregnant women because of the lack of control that researchers have over their subjects. This has left pregnancy and birth as a very mysterious process, which is frustrating. While more research is needed in an academic setting, women have been birthing babies since the history of humanity. We can trust that women’s bodies know what to do, that midwives can pass down their knowledge, and that there are practices that are common between rural and remote midwives that the scientists may not yet know of. I am not interested in pursuing an academic research career, but I am very interested in learning the proper building blocks of my field in an academic setting, and then continuing my education from traditional midwifery practices around the world. I want the skills to evaluate the efficacy of these practices as I come across them. Somehow, I have to piece through the information I’m being taught here and marry that to the real-world experience I hope to get abroad.

Finally, I went to the School of Midwifery this week to ask about some statistics and census information. I was curious to know what the graduation rates are like, what graduation employment numbers are, what the dropout or fail rates are, and how competitive the scholarships are. The woman who met with me was lovely and understanding, but wasn’t able (or wasn’t allowed) to give me any of this information.