Post Vegas Girls’s Trip and work weekend wrap up. This might be long.

I want to start by saying that I work with some badass bitches. And every once in awhile, I have to float to L&D where the wild things are. Well, on Friday night it was bat shit crazy up in that joint and it was my turn to float. Fresh off the plane from Vegas with some other badass bitches, I scrubbed up and ran out the door literally 30 minutes after I pulled into the driveway.

No sleep til Brooklyn. Cuz that’s how it be sometimes. #nocsforlifeyo

Since Covid, most of the time when my unit floats to L&D one of our nurses sits at the front desk and screens patients for symptoms, exposure, reason for being there, gestational age, etc. before they are allowed into the inner sanctum: Triage. It’s so we can protect our staff and other patients from exposure to covid or any other infectious disease. It’s probably the least stressful job of the night, to be honest. But it’s also very boring and tedious because we are supposed to audit charts in between screening patients and in the middle of the night it’s mind numbing. Hard to stay energized and awake. That wasn’t what they wanted me for.

Labor was short and patients just kept coming through the door. I had two early miso inductions and tried to be as helpful as I could in between doing my own stuff. So I felt like I was in the middle of a sea storm and I was safe in my life vest on the deck of the boat.

And damn, those women know how to sail.

They saved a mama that night. Like for real. Do you know how many liters of blood most pregnant women have? I do. It’s 8 Liters. And I know that it seems like time is running in slow motion when you are going to get the blood from the blood bank. And how you wish you could run faster. And how they hand you the FFP and platelets and you hope it’s right even though the FFP and platelets are a different blood type cuz you can’t remember every damn thing forever and you just go with it and trust your team to get it right and hand it off and go google it. And now you will never forget. Cuz most pregnant women have ONLY 8 Liters of blood in their whole body. 8 LITERS.

And that was just one thing going on. So many plates spinning. And the captain of that ship just handled it. All of it. Like a tennis player. 40-Love.

So that was a hard day’s night.

But, I was surrounded in excellence. And organized chaos. And gratitude that I didn’t have to go into the OR. Glad that they are the ones that do that. Thankful for their team, always. Thankful they run into the fire every day and still come back the next.

Then for the next two nights it was my privilege to take care of that lucky, so very lucky mama, on my own High Risk Maternity unit. To show her her baby for the first time. To tell her she is strong enough to get through this.

It’s time to hold your baby now, mama. Skin to skin, chest to chest, heart to heart.

I call that balance.

PS: What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Even at age 49. And 50.