A journey into midwifery
Juanita Johnson didn’t plan to become a midwife. She started out in the medical field by getting an associate’s degree in nursing at Dalton State College in 1978, then she tested out for her RN and worked as a nurse for the next 15 years while she and her husband lived in LaFayette and raised and educated their four sons.
“My mom was pressuring me to go back to school and get my Bachelor of Science,” says Johnson. “She was always my biggest cheerleader.” That was in 1995. Johnson followed her mother’s advice and earned her BS. Next, her mother urged her to work toward a master’s degree.
Johnson doubted she could do it, but she made a deal with her mother – she would take the GRE and if she got a good enough score, she’d pursue a higher degree.
“I memorized the 300 most common words on the GRE,” Johnson says. “I think that helped a lot.”
Johnson applied to three schools: Emory University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She was accepted at all them. But there was reality to face. “I had no money and I wasn’t willing to plunge my family into debt to further my education.”
Then a letter came from Emory University – if Johnson was willing to enroll as a dualdegree student, she would be covered by a full grant. She agreed to the offer and started on her master’s degree in nursing and public health.
What she didn’t realize until she was in school was that the nursing part of her grant was for a special focus on midwifery. “Intensive care was really my first love,” says Johnson. “I was kind of neutral on midwifery.”
Johnson says she could see God’s hand at every turn of her career, leading her here, nudging her there. Her grant didn’t cover housing costs and she felt intimidated by the busyness and traffic of Atlanta, but she found a lady who was willing to rent out an apartment she didn’t normally lease. The location was very close to the school and Johnson was able to find two other graduate students to share the expenses.
Midwifery turned out to be something Johnson loved, and she found herself fascinated by the public health classes where she worked on assignments with a doctor from Iran, and nurses from Israel, Fiji and Swaziland. “I got a chance to see the many ways different people can look at the same problem based on their cultural background,” she says. “For instance, for one assignment we were allotted a certain amount of imaginary medical supplies. I wanted to distribute them among the community immediately, but my work partner, the doctor from Iran, wanted to hold back for fear he wouldn’t be able to replace them. I felt confident we could get more, but that wasn’t his experience in his home country.”
After two-and-ahalf years of study, Johnson graduated. “The Dali Lama spoke at our graduation. He was such a sweet, funny man. You could feel the love he had for people.”
Back home, work did not fall immediately into Johnson’s lap. “In retrospect, it was a good thing,” she says. “Within a short time, there were three deaths and two serious illnesses in my family and I was able to help care for my relatives.”
About a year after graduation, Johnson was offered a position with obstetrician Dr. Edgar Anderson where she worked for the next 17 years. While her services covered a wide array of women’s health issues, many of her favorite stories are about babies she’s delivered.
There was the time a man came racing and screaming into the hospital carrying his wife who still had four weeks until she was supposed to deliver but was in severe shock from eclampsia. “We managed to get mother and baby safely through it,” says Johnson.
Then there was the couple having their second baby. “A healthy little boy came out,” says Johnson, “but I saw he had a cleft palate. I put him in his momma’s arms and told his parents he was a fine, healthy baby and that the cleft palate could be corrected. His daddy fell in love with him right away.” The next time Johnson saw the family during a visit to her office, the baby’s older sister was carrying a doll with a cleft palate and running her finger along her brother’s lip and kissing his tiny mouth.
Not every situation has the happiest outcome, Johnson says, but there’s still a lot of love and beauty in some of the hardest circumstances. One patient found out at 20 weeks of pregnancy that her unborn daughter was anencephalic – the baby had no brain. She was urged by a doctor to abort the baby, but that’s not what she wanted to do. “I supported her decision,” says Johnson. “I view myself as an advocate for my patients. In cases like this, they need support and someone to be on their side.”
With Johnson’s help, the woman delivered her baby at 35 weeks. “The baby lived for five hours. The entire family got to come and see her and hold her. Then her parents and older brother spent her last hours with her and she died in her mother’s arms, surrounded every minute with love.”
Yet another case touched Johnson deeply. “A young, saltof-the-earth couple came in. I didn’t do the delivery, but I attended it. It was the first highforceps delivery I ever saw, something that isn’t done much anymore. When I was drying the baby off, I saw that his head was very misshapen from the pressure of the forceps and I was worried about how the parents would take it. I was trying to make the baby look better when his daddy started talking to him.”
Johnson says the new baby’s father started cooing, “Hey buddy, how are you doing? We’ve been waiting a long time to see you” and on and on. “The baby turned his little crooked head toward his father and I knew then that babies recognize voices. He’d spent nine months listening to that voice and he knew it.”
“Every baby is different,” says Johnson. “Some come out with their fists swinging like they’re mad at the world. Some come out looking surprised at the world they’ve entered. Each one is a miracle.”
Johnson says she’s learned a lot about people over her years of practice. “Before I became a midwife, I worked in intensive care and experienced being with people when they died. It’s a privilege to be with someone at that most vulnerable point in their life. As a nursemidwife, I see young women come in at six-weeks pregnant, self-centered and immature, and over the next eight months I watch them transform into mother material – people who learn to care deeply about another human being and its needs.”
Johnson says a lot has changed about how babies are delivered, including more respect afforded expectant women and how they want to have their babies. “I hope the field, and medicine in general, will keep working toward treating the whole person and being more advocates for patients than for methods or decisions based solely on statistical criteria.”
Change has come to Johnson’s own life recently. “God opened another door for me when the time was right,” she says. “Running around between my office and four hospitals and being on call so much of the time was getting to be a little too much. I wanted to spend more time with my mother who is aging and with my grandchildren and my husband.”
Johnson resigned her position as a nursemidwife two years ago but wasn’t sure what she’d do next. One day, a friend told her about a teaching position that had opened at Georgia Northwestern’s Rock Spring campus. “Now I teach Maternity and Women’s Health, Neurological Nursing, and Rescue and Disaster Management. The training I got at Emory in public health policy and management is paying off even this far down the road. I’m so thankful for the way God has allowed me to be a part of bringing new life into the world. I loved every time I put a brand new baby in its momma’s arms and got to see the beginning of a new family.”