My heart is still pounding

I had an experience last night that had my hands shaking for a good 10 minutes afterward. A little background is needed for this. I'm in a Family Medicine residency which means we do adult medicine, pediatrics, and OB/GYN stuff including delivering babies. Anytime patients come in to be evaluated I see them, come up with a plan, run it by an attending physician (teaching doctors) and then go ahead with the plan. When its close to delivery the doctors come in and stand next to me while I'm delivering the baby. I've had 15-20 deliveries this year and it's usually a very fun experience for everyone (once the baby is out, that is).
Last night I'm on the phone with one of the teaching doctors for a patient when I get interrupted by one of the nurses who takes the phone from me and says, "you need to get in that room right now!" The doctor of this other patient had just recently gone home because the patient wasn't really dilating that quickly. Well, she dilated in a hurry and as this was her 5th child, things moved pretty quickly from there. Before the other doctor even make it to the hospital, and before I even had time to get anything on but some gloves, I'm catching a baby. (Delivering a baby is pretty messy business and usually I have a splash gown for...splashes, and some booties on to cover my shoes). Talk about getting your heart pumping.
Part of the reason that this was so heart-pumping was that 2-3 weeks before residency started I had a dream that was similar to this. Some lady was having a baby right then, and the surrounding crowd asked if anyone was a doctor. I proudly raised my hand and they said I needed to delivery this baby. Then the panic set in because I didn't know what I was doing and this was stressful enough to wake me up out of sleep (for those of you who don't know how hard I sleep, that's sayin' something). I am pleased to say that I have learned much since then, and everything went smoothly with this delivery, but my hands were shaking for a good ten minutes afterwards.

Another world

Have you ever had the feeling that there is another world just out of sight. I saw the preview for The Spiderwick Chronicles, and it reminds me of that. I'm on my OB/GYN rotation and we were in a C-section this morning. After they clean the patient's belly, they put a sheet up between their face and the rest of their body (I don't know too many people who really want to see or could handle seeing themselves with an 8 inch incision in their belly). They are numb from the waist down and are just waiting for the baby's cry. When the baby is born it cries, thy clean it off and give it to the pediatricians in the room who clean it off, the father is taking pictures, they bring the baby back to the mom to look at and...we're still down there trying to close up this gaping hole in her abdomen. Today this was all going on while the woman was losing lots of blood (like 1.5 liters worth of blood).
Them - Oh look how cute this baby is. He's got my chin
Us - clamp this down there, maybe it's coming from there
Them - Oh he is a fighter, look at him cry
Us - No, you're not sewing fast enough
Them - Can you believe that we have a baby. This is great
Us - There isn't time to make it look perfect, just sew here to stop all this blood.

And so on. It was a very surreal experience. It was like to different worlds right next to each other and (because I wasn't really doing anything important) I was able to see both of them in this weird juxtaposition.