Curtain #3

Tired. I looked up to the window, hoping that the sun's rays would dissipate the water in my eyes, and below it I saw number 4. "Next, students, come to curtain number 4," the instructor said.

Dr. Moshe continued explaining how to read a fetal heart monitor, when to induce labour, when a latent phase labour was, what to do with a woman with constitional hypertension, and finally a woman coming with polyhdrominos and gestational diabetes. I moved with him and the other students removing one curtain, seeing another woman in labour, in pain, and then closing the curtain, and looking at another new monitor, with a different expereince of pains of labour. Each woman was placed next to another one with only curtains separating them, and the voices and motions of contractions painfully uniting women and newborn.

I stood in the back of the crowd of students, with my weight shifting from one leg to the other, and my head from the doctor to the window outside. The students shared the right answers to the questions. I usually paid attention and cared to share the right answers.

Not today- I desired the rare commodity of privacy in labour and delivery room.

Before joining the teaching round, I had helped a 19 year old Bedouin woman during her first delivery. I had hoped that the midwife would allow me to deliver the infant, and introduced myself. The answer to my request was no because this was the woman's first delivery. I introduced myself to the woman who did not speak Hebrew, and became her translator for the next two hours of her, her infant's and my life. As the contractions came, she climbed up her bed, closed her legs and screamed closing her eyes. Fighting, not surrendering.

"She does not know what is happening," said the midwife, callously, indifferelty. As labour progressed, and the same body language of the woman continued, the frusterated midwife said, "She thinks she is the only one delivering! We need to get done with this." And I wanted to tell the midwife, "You know, you see many deliveries and to you it is routine. But to this woman, this is her first delivery. Nobody explained anything to her about how it happens."

The woman looked more so like a young girl, having gotten married less than a year ago. After asking her if anyone came with her, she said her mother-in-law but she did not want her to come. Translating and yet also coaching a woman through her birth, while still shielding her from the screams of the midwife for her lack of cooperation was what perhaps brought tears to my eyes this morning as I joined the teaching round. "Breathe in deeply and then push," I told her, against her own and the midwife's scream. My voice was the only calming, gentle and still factor, against the sea of motion her body embraced going up the bed, against the sea of motion she created closing her legs, against the sea of motion my arms, and my classmates' created to keep her legs open.

The little girl finally came out around 945am. Indifferent, uninvolved, disconnected, oblvious, ambivilant, such were the two hands that I helped the woman place on her child. "She might fall, hold on to her tight," I said, without leaving her side, knowing that there were no hands that held the infant strongly. For how could one child, now called a mother, hold and take care of another child, now called a daughter?

The placenta was not completely removed according to the midwife who called the doctor to do a bimanual exam to remove the rest of it. The woman's body motion continued to escape like a tide that had just broken on the shore and now was retrieving. "Die (stop it in Hebrew)," screamed the doctor with frusteration. If he could not remove all of the parts of the placenta, she was going to be taken to operation, he explained to her. The higher his voice got, the deeper his hand went into her vagina and the more her body retrieved back up the bed, the more she closed her legs and screamed. My voice repeated calmly and gently to breathe deeply, to come back down, to open her legs to complete the retrieval of the placenta.

"Raw, unable to embrace her expereince of birth, her first born was a Bedouin woman behind curtain #3. Her name is Mariam," I thought, having closed the curtain and having joined the students in curtain #4.