Portrait of a Tender (#9) - Kristin - Labor and Delivery
Kristin had always known she wanted to help people. She decided on nursing as a conduit to this mission and graduated from the nursing program at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village 38 years ago. Shortly afterwards, she moved here to Charlottesville, VA and has been working on labor and delivery at SMJH for 36 years.
"Birth is a sacred event and I feel blessed to be able to help guide and support women through it... At SMJH we are able to practice independently and provide the least amount of intervention possible, while still providing the safety that the hospital provides."
Kristin also chose nursing because of its value in providing medical mission work. She has been traveling to India for 30 years with Virginia Children's Connection ( https://vcc.avenue.org/ ), a non-profit medical volunteer organization based in Charlottesville Virginia. VCC was originally created to serve the vast need for facial reconstructive surgery in India due to high rates of cleft lip and palate birth defects. The reason for these high rates in some developing countries is multi-faceted, Kristin explains. She has learned through her work that poor maternal nutrition plays a role as well as "other reasons we don't fully understand yet".
Kristin has travelled to Giridih, India about 11 times over the last 30 years and she has witnessed firsthand a shift in services needed over the years. Burn and scar revision now competes with cleft lip and palate surgeries as a main service provided by VCC. Kristin, a surgical nurse as well, estimates that over 75% of the patients she assists for surgical scar revision are women. They are frequently burned in household accidents, cooking over gas stoves. She notes how the use of synthetic materials for saris has led to an increase in accidents because of their extreme flammability. However, accidents are not the only cause of high rates of facial burns in this area. Sometimes the burns are also the result of violence against women.
Working through the pandemic these last two years has been a challenge like no other. Being a first assistant in the OR at the birthing center, Kristin is no stranger to PPE, but the necessary wearing of it for patients and staff alike has created barriers like never before. "The PPE creates such a separation between patients and nurses."
There were practical issues to overcome as well. Kristin looks back on the mothers she assisted as they pushed, sometimes for hours, to birth their babies, grabbing what breath they could between pushes, often in pain, sometimes vomiting... through it all mothers were expected to remain masked as well as staff. This was for the safety of everyone in the room, and a brutal reality for everyone involved. Hospitals around the country were constantly reviewing and responding to emerging science and recommendations surrounding Covid in order to achieve a balance of safety and support for their patients and staff. Nurses did what they could, when they could, and how they could in an effort to keep everyone as safe as they could. It's been hard on everyone.i
