the hands know

I've been a birth center nurse for just shy of two years now, and I still feel so green it's not funny, but the other day I managed to share some info that one of my more experienced colleagues didn't know. It's purely anecdotal -- someone mentioned it to me, and I've seen it several times, but I don't know if it's something that's been confirmed by research. Babies who are born shortly after mom gets nubain (say 1-2 hours before birth) are miserable for a couple of hours -- screaming and inconsolable. One of the other nurse's attributes it to a "nubain headache." So we saw another kid that pretty much fit that description the other night, and I told a couple of people what I'd heard & it was new to them. Now we all want to go look it up in the literature and see if it's something that others have noted. If there's nothing in the literature -- hey, a couple of us have masters degrees, we could do a study and put something in the literature.

That's what I love about my profession -- the body of knowledge we work from is always in flux, being added to (in many cases) by the people doing the work. People talk about using intuition in making assessments, but I think it's more a matter of noticing patterns in a way that's difficult to articulate -- you're using senses to pick up things that you don't generally have language to describe, so you credit intuition rather than logic for your conclusions. But really, you're taking in objective data and analyzing it -- it's just harder to pin down.

Everyone does this sort of thing -- if you do any gardening, you learn how to pull weeds so that they give it up at the roots rather than just snapping off at the soil surface. You also learn that different weeds come up with a different grip or tension. And you dread the weed that can't be pulled by any means you've discovered -- the leaves mash and strip from the stem, leaving your hand coated in slime and a root that will send up more leaves still in the ground. You know by the feel and sound of things when you're car's brake pads are gone and you're scoring the rotors, but how do you describe to someone how that feels coming through the soles of your feet? If they haven't felt it before, how do you convey the info so they would recognize it if they felt it? Language is all about making mental pictures, so it's easier to describe things visually.

I remember learning in nursing school how to feel pulses. It would seem straightforward, but you have to learn to feel at different depths to get a radial pulse versus a femoral pulse. Sometimes you get fooled, if you're listening hard for a popliteal pulse, and you have strong pulses in your fingers you might be hearing your own pulse. I slipped and said listening -- but when you're trying to feel something moving, it almost feels like listening. And the way we sense pulses in western medicine is completely different from what they do in traditional Chinese medicine -- there are more distinctions that can be made, more information that can be gathered than I've even scratched the surface of.

I always wondered what it was that I should be doing with my life, but I knew that when I found it, it would be something that would educate my hands as well as my mind. My hands are very happy with my choice, and they're still learning.