There’s so much to unpack in this episode… I think what many of us could relate to was Trixie’s (Helen George) situation. “Work-life balance,” as we call it today, wasn’t the catchphrase in the late 1960s, yet the struggle was real for women like Trixie who had a profession (although, the number of women with jobs was nowhere near what it is now). In the 1960s, a great number of nurses and midwives in the UK were nuns whose vocation and profession were the same. For a young woman who was not a nun, if she did work as a nurse before marriage, she would forgo a nursing career once marriage ensued.

When Matthew (Olly Rix) asks Trixie, “Are you a wife or a midwife?” it was a gut punch to the stomach, not because my partner has ever asked me that, but more so because I have posed the question to myself so many times. Oftentimes, this question in my head is more phrased like “Are you a wife and mother or a midwife?” We all want to be superwoman and juggle work, home and family, leisure, our spirituality, and personal development pursuits – like furthering our education – and make it look effortless. But the truth is though we may want to do and have it all, the reality is that it is exceedingly tough to achieve.

When a flustered Matthew calls Trixie during her work shift, she is distracted from fully attending to her laboring patient. In her haste to wrap up the birth and get home to sort things out, she rushes and makes a crucial error. When the placenta is delivered, it is the responsibility of the provider (midwife or physician) to inspect both the side that faces the uterine wall and the side that faces the baby in utero and make sure that the placenta is intact, with no pieces of it missing. If a portion of the placental tissue is left inside, it can lead to infection – similar to what the woman in the show got – or a devastating hemorrhage. While Trixie wasn’t as thorough as she needed to be, even when the midwifery student raised some concern about the placental appearance, nobody could have been harder on her than she was on herself when her patient developed complications because of the retained placenta. She realized her error and could not have been more mortified or remorseful. Like you, I will remain peeled to this storyline to see whether Matthew and Trixie can work through this…

The other interesting storyline here was the noncompliant patient who did not take her iron in pregnancy, did not show up for appointments, and also smoked. Were you surprised to see that she was smoking in the waiting room of the clinic? There actually was a point in history where smoking was not so much discouraged in pregnancy because it was felt that women could keep their babies small and better able to fit through the pelvis in labor. Talk about a great example of faulty logic, right?