Career developments

There are a couple of major developments on my career path!  

One, I'm starting up my own business as a licensed midwife providing prenatal and postpartum supplemental care to women planning hospital births.  I'll be offering them all the care home birth midwives give their clients during our hour-long visits that obstetricians and hospital midwives simply don't have the time to give, and may also not have the training to give (e.g. holistic approaches).  I will also provide home inductions for select prenatal clients and potentially for select clients of doula friends;  the first and foremost criterion for home induction will be that it would occur within a day or two of a scheduled hospital induction.  (In other words, I'd be trying to help them avoid Pitocin and/or Cytotec.)   Well-woman care and prenatal classes will round out the business.  Stay tuned for my website!  

Two, I'm officially a DVC student for Spring 2013. I will be taking prerequisites for the BSN and MSN programs I am considering, so that I will be ready to move forward either direction when I decide (in 2014 or 2015) whether to go back on call as a licensed midwife providing home birth services or to go back to school to get my MSN to be a nurse-midwife in a hospital.  Nursing prerequisites tend to be impacted classes, so hopefully I am going to be able to get these classes done within a reasonable amount of time while still being able to schedule them while Donovan is in preschool or at night after bedtime.  There are also some online options I can explore, at DVC and otherwise, and I can also take classes at CSU East Bay as part of its "Open University" program.  Most importantly, I have to get excellent grades so that I can get accepted into an accelerated BSN or MSN program.  (And then, if I go the BSN route, I will need to continue to have nothing but top-notch grades so I can get into a distance MSN program.)  My graduate school GPA was fantastic, but my UCLA GPA makes me a bit nervous, especially if you count the pass/no pass classes which factor in as C grades if they are included.  It's above the minimum, but not as high as I'd like to feel confident about getting into a school that's high on my list.  Also, I'm not sure how it's going to look that I started grad school and left before completing my MA.  I am hoping that they will see my tenacity and perseverance from my completion of my midwifery licensure program, and understand that I left my MA program simply because I decided against the career that had been the whole purpose of obtaining the degree.  Given that the accelerated programs specialize in helping people switch careers, I am optimistic that they won't hold that against me.  Regardless, I'm holding myself to a high standard for my grades in these prerequisites.  

Finally, I am still hoping to do some birth work over the next couple of years.  Of course, with a class schedule, I won't have the option of going on call full time.  However, I am hoping that a birth center or private home birth practice will be able to find a use for me to be on call a couple of days a week, or that I can fill in for an assist during school breaks, to enable her to take a vacation.  It might be pie in the sky, considering the full 24/7 call that most area midwives are committed to, but I'm throwing it out there that I am looking for this kind of work. 

If you are a friend or client who has a friend planning a hospital birth but not getting everything she needs from her OB or who is postpartum and would like some extra support, or if you are a home birth midwife with a potential client who just couldn't convince her husband to agree to home birth, I would appreciate your referrals.  If you are a home birth or birth center midwife who would like to share call or has an assist who would like to share call, I would love to talk about working together.  If you would like to simply cheer me on for success in school or in my business, I would also appreciate that!