The nurses keep their hair tied back to keep it out of the way. Once the woman is settled in her room, the nurse will have her put on a hospital gown, open in the back, and then do an examination. This procedure is to determine how far the woman has progressed meaning how imminent labor may be. The nurse does a pelvic or cervical exam of the woman to determine how dilated her cervix is. A woman's cervix typically opens one centimeter per hour until it reaches ten centimeters at which time the woman begins to push the baby out. .
Each birth I observed was a different length of time ranging from twenty-four hours to twenty minutes. In every birth, however, the majority of medical care came from the nurses. They were all very friendly and accommodating to the laboring woman's needs and wants however they were constrained by certain policies of the hospital. For example, this particular hospital requires that every woman, upon arrival, must receive a hep-lock which is an device which opens a line to a vein in her arm, fastened by tape, which will enable her medical providers to hook her up to an intravenous line for hydrating solutions or medications in case of an emergency. This procedure can be uncomfortable yet most of the women I worked with didn't mind. There were only two births where the women did not receive hep-locks and that was because the women were already about to start pushing the baby out and the hep-lock was overlooked. .
Another policy is that for the first hour after arrival the woman must be hooked up to the fetal heart rate monitor. This contraption is a large machine with a belt that straps around the woman's belly as she lies in bed. Through sensors that look like sponge pads they are able to locate the babies heart rate. With this machine they are also able to monitor the rate and strength of uterine contractions the woman is having. Throughout four of the births, the women were required to keep the monitor on intermittently if not constantly which kept them confined to the bed.
