June 2009
June was a month of challenges trying to get our house set up. Finding how to get drinking water and cooking gas set up in the house took a lot of work. We spent a lot of time waiting for maintenance and delivery men. The weather was starting to cool down, relatively as it went from 110 to 105! It does make a difference. Mike was continuing to work a lot.

I was working as well. It was a challenge. India does not have midwives that are real practitioners. The nurses here are trained as an Auxiliary Nurse & Midwife or General Nurse & Midwifery. These trainings are one to three years and the nurses (or sisters, as they are called here) are trained for the test without a lot of training on the understanding of the information. Unfortunately, since there are so many medical schools, nursing students in the hospitals are not allowed to do too many hands on things and are not able to work on their skills. Nurses come out of school in the ideal case as having the basic knowledge to be a midwife but have probably never been taught how to deliver a baby or even touched mother or baby during delivery. It is really unfortunate for nursing here. Nurses on the floor are not independent and only follow the doctor’s orders. A nurse would never start an IV without the doctor saying it is ok even if the woman is bleeding to death. This is because the doctors often scold them for just about anything. The hierarchy of doctor being the god of the hospital still rings true in this community. The nurses are just there to assist the doctors. Bringing them hand wash, filling water bottles, opening doors, and finding gloves for them. As an independent woman and Western trained nurse it was very difficult for me to see. It also seemed like it was such a waste of talent. The nurses are basically handmaidens. I imagine it is like nursing in the West during the 1940s and 50s. Sometimes it also felt like the nurses did not want to do more.

I was given the ENORMOUS challenge of empowering and educating the nurses. I had to have numerous classes for nurses and doctors on what a nurse midwife is and what I can do as a midwife. After two different sessions with the doctors, I would still get questions like, can you cut an episiotomy? can you conduct deliveries? Were you not listening? The fact that I have NURSE in my title they think that I am not able to work independently. I faced challenges everyday dealing with the doctors on what I can and cannot do in the US and what I am trained to do. I was able to get a great relationship with the laborist (the senior doctor who was on the labor floor everyday to become a consultant), the doctor in charge of academics and the director, Dr Evita. I was really nice to have some support from them. I was working 30 hours a week and felt like nothing was getting accomplished but trying to make any change is difficult.

We spent our anniversary at a spa. Michael only had one day off all month and it was our anniversary. It was nice to spend the day with him in a nice, relaxing area.

At our park

Our first homemade Indian dinner

Hyderabad Sites

World Music Day