All my obstetric calls seem to take me on to places I do not want to go. My last call started with a older woman with severe high blood pressure at about 26 weeks pregnancy. These pressures were so high she was at risk of seizing, and her baby was not getting the blood flow through the placenta that it needed to live. So off to the operating room we went to deliver this too young baby. To complicate the matter there were big benign tumors all over her uterus. God is good and we were able to deliver her baby without too much difficulty. Unfortunately 2 days later her baby passed. 26 weeks is a threshold age for premature babies at our hospital where the chance of survival decreases. This same mother did end up seizing 2 days later from her pre-eclampsia, and is still in the ICU being treated for very high blood pressure. As this was going on we had a call that a patient was coming in with a molar pregnancy, which is a non-viable pregnancy that can transform to a cancer. She had been bleeding, although she was stable on arrival. Then another call came with a possible ectopic pregnancy arriving (an ectopic pregnancy is a non-viable pregnancy outside the uterus which can cause massive bleeding killing the mother). We started evaluating her, and a another call came in letting us know that a woman with a cancer of her hand (she was going for amputation of her entire arm the following day) who happened to be pregnant had unfortunately lost her baby. It is called an IUFD or intrauterine fetal demise. Did we need to induce now or wait until after surgery. We decided to wait and get the arm taken care of first. Another older woman rolled into the casualty (ER) with severe pelvic pain. We admitted her and it turned out that she had bilateral tubo-ovarian abcesses that were causing her to become septic. This are major infections of the female reproductive organs. Somewhere amidst all of this another woman arrived. She was 38 weeks pregnant, and she had a huge vulvar abcess due to an infected Bartholin’s gland. We admitted her to prepare her for surgery the following day. It was a busy night, and not all of it is exactly the bread and butter of family medicine. Oh yeah. I have just been switched off of medicine to do a month of full time obstetrics. The needs of the hospital must be met. 🙂 What have I got myself into?