Sylvia Baddeley

Sylvia Baddeley is a retired Midwife with forty-plus years of clinical practice. The death of her sister-in-law from a rare ruptured aortic aneurysm the day after her daughter was born was the catalyst that had driven her to enter the world of Midwifery.

Her career spans a journey that includes pioneering Aquanatal classes in the UK and lecturing locally, nationally and internationally at a number of Midwifery conferences as well as teaching exercise to music classes as part of her Midwife role. She acted as advisor to London Central YMCA’s video on exercise during pregnancy and published a book called Health Related Fitness During Pregnancy. She was also Midwife advisor on Desmond Morris’s video called Babywatching.

Throughout her career she published many articles on exercise during pregnancy in Midwifery journals. She qualified as an aromatherapist, body masseur and reflexologist as well as becoming a baby massage instructor and integrated all of these skills into her Midwifery practice. Her work in a local Sure Start programme offered opportunity for multi-agency working and the development of her role as a Bonding and Attachment Specialist Midwife for which she was invited, with others, to afternoon tea in the gardens of Number Ten, Downing Street, to celebrate achievements. Sylvia is also a familiar voice on local radio.

Sylvia’s Reflections On Becoming A Midwife

It is only since retiring that i have had the time or inclination to reflect on my professional life as a midwife.Practising midwifery is completely immersive and gives one little if any time to contemplate during long working days.Other than the professional necessity of reflection on clinical care given by myself when on duty it is only now, retired, that i have the luxury of looking back over a career that spanned forty plus years.

What was it that drew me to want to be a midwife?There had been no others in my family before me, i had no burning desire to be a nurse when i was very young. I qualified as a nursery nurse at the age of eighteen and worked in a variety of nursery schools and infant schools. My first exposure to the world of midwifery was pretty catastrophic.

My sister in law died the day after she had delivered, sitting up in bed nursing her daughter.An undiagnosed aortic aneurysm had ruptured and the frantic efforts of staff could not save her.She was the first maternal death recorded in the brand new six story maternity unit that, little did I know then, I would spend a huge chunk of my working life in.I learned, much later in life that her mother had also died shortly after delivery, caused by lack of care following massive haemorrhage after a home birth.

The anguish and grief within the family burned pictures into my memory which are still as powerful today. My mother crying, my brother grief ridden and inconsolable, my young niece asking for her mother, the local midwife ( who many years later I would work alongside) coming to the house with a student Midwife in tow.

The very first birth that I witnessed on my first day as a student midwife was also the day that I learned another harsh lesson.The baby did not breathe after delivery and could not be resuscitated.

I’m not sure if this was the reason that our set of eight students were the first set who completed the two years of training with no one leaving.You would think the opposite would be the case, but I think that dreadful experience cemented in our minds the importance of the role we had pledged to undertake.I did not want to start my first book with a death when Midwifery is mostly so much about life and new beginnings, so I chose to change the outcome in my first chapter in Push! Close Encounters Of The Midwife Kind, though the clinical details used are all clinically accurate.

Deciding to write Push ! Close Encounters Of The Midwife Kind and One More Push! Close Encounters Of The Midwife Kind was initially an attempt to record my personal experiences over two years from 1972 to 1974 as a student Midwife and then the first years of practicing as a qualified Midwife.

Midwifery practice at the time of my retirement had changed so very much.The maternity unit that held so many memories had been demolished to make way for a brand new hospital complex and the world of midwifery practice as I knew it was fast disappearing before my very eyes.I decided to document in the best way I knew how the world of the Midwife in the 1970’s, a time,I realised at my retirement that had already irrevocably disappeared.

Supporting pregnant women is not just about delivering babies, it gives one a unique perspective on the lives of women and their families.It takes you to extremes.In one day I went from being offered a glass of champagne following a beautiful home birth, sitting on a bed with wealthy parents and their other young children, to delivering a still birth on a kitchen floor within minutes of arrival on a council estate where half a dozen neighbours were also in attendance as the woman’s husband was in the pub.

Practising midwifery takes you to emotional highs and then drags you through barbed wire, it’s a roller coaster. Emotionally it can be brutal and an hour later, so utterly life affirming you could cry with the joy of it. No two days are ever the same.

I have had the great pleasure of watching my last delivery grow from a bonny baby to a lovely young woman carving out her own future as she lives next door to me.I often look at my hands and think of all the babies who have passed through them, wondering what sort of life they have carved out for themselves.

Push! Close Encounters Of The Midwife Kind and One More Push ! shares with the reader some of the many experiences that happened to me in the early days of my career.I hope that these experiences shed some light on the marvellous, life affirming, awe inspiring sometimes brutal world of midwifery practice which is often mistakenly portrayed in a rosy hue of gentle platitudes.The marvel of the human body and the resilience of both mothers and Midwives never ceased to amaze me. They have taught me much and those memories will never leave me.I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I did writing about a career that I wouldn’t have changed for the world.

Sylvia Baddeley