10 of the best real life midwife stories

In a pickle

“One lady got herself into a bit of a mess after her waters broke in the supermarket. She was so concerned that people would think she’d wet herself that she grabbed a few jars of pickles off of the shelf and smashed them on the floor. Women normally have a distinct smell to them when their waters break, but this took the biscuit.”

A twin thing

“There was a very sweet moment with a set of twins who were delivered and then put in the same cot together. One of them started to cry and the other twin promptly put his finger in her mouth as a dummy.”

Cheeky code

“I was once on shift with a doctor, who checked the baby and wrote in the notes the letters FLK. I asked if everything was OK, he told me everything was fine, but to let him know when the partner came in. The doctor met the rest of the family and told them they were fine to go home. I re-checked the notes and the doctor had now written, FLK OK LLD. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked the doctor. He said, ‘Funny looking kid, OK, looks like Dad.’”

Dazed dad

“During a late shift I overheard a new dad on the phone in the delivery suite talking to his mum. He said, ‘The baby came out purple, they wrapped her up and then stuck her under a grill’.”

Milking it

“A little girl was watching as her mother breastfed her newborn baby. She promptly said, ‘Mummy, I need milk, too.’ The mum explained that breast milk is just for tiny babies, to which the shocked little girl replied, ‘I’m not that big!’”

Size does matter

“There was once this new dad who was so proud of the size of his son’s genitalia that he wouldn’t stop going on about it. While he was busy gloating one of the midwives retorted, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll grow into it’.”

Barking mad

“I once asked a lady to ‘pant like a dog’ while she was in labour, at which point she started shouting ‘woof, woof’.”

Toddler titters

“A little boy overheard a conversation between his mum and another pregnant lady. His mum was explaining that she thought that if the baby was positioned in the front, it was more likely to be a boy, and if it was positioned near the back, it was more likely to be a girl. On seeing a rather large lady in front of the pregnant woman, the boy shouted, ‘Look – that lady is going to have two girls as both the bumps are towards her back.’”

Food for thought

“A woman once told me that she’d left her partner to look after their 14-month-old baby. When she came home, her partner proudly explained that he’d used up the last of the milk in the fridge to make scrambled eggs for his tea. She then had to explain that he’d just used her expressed breast milk.”