Birth of a Midwife
Rebecca Leeman
January 3, 2020
12 Comments
As a nurse, I was brand new to labor and delivery–and I was on my third night shift in a row. Walking back from a quick break, I was called over by the charge nurse.
“You have the next admit from triage,” she told me. “She’s a live one–and so is her family. They’re carnies.”
“What’s that?” I asked, bewildered.
“You know, the people who do the circus and carnival circuit–gypsies,” she said, innocently using a term that is now considered derogatory, but was then often applied to the nomadic ethnic group known as Roma. “She’s going natural.”