Today I walked into a delivery room for the first time, took some photos and fainted. It was a reminder that sometimes the reality of working in the field is impossible to prepare for.

I woke up this morning, downed a malaria pill and slipped out of the house to explore the grounds of Bollobhpur — a hospital compound where I'll be staying for two weeks to report on birthing in rural Bangladesh. I'm traveling with a group of midwives from all over the world. The only fluent English and Bangla speaker in the small village is Sister Gillian Rose, a British midwife whose years of experience and service in this remote village have earned her the nickname "the second Mother Teresa" among her coworkers.

We hadn't yet met when I saw her; her sandals swept across the grass on her way to the hospital ward.

"Good morning," she said, moving swiftly across the compound. "Come this way — there's a delivery now."

Cracking a wooden door open, she motioned for me to enter. Realizing she may have thought I was one of the midwives, I turned around to introduce myself properly, but she was already gone.

In the back of the room I saw a small woman lying on her back, legs spread, toes wrapped around two metal poles on the side of the bed. Five Bengali nursing students and one staff nurse encouraged her through her contractions.

"Dao, dao, dao," they said — "give, give, give." The nursing students looked inquisitively at me. I felt helpless as droplets of sweat trickled down the laboring woman's forehead.

An hour went by —

"It has to be 95 degrees," I thought as I fanned the woman with a duct tape–covered book. She was quiet as the nurses began checking her progress. The baby began crowning, but it didn't seem there was any way it would squeeze out from her body.

The nurse grabbed a pair of scissors from a piece of cloth and performed an episiotomy — cutting the woman's vaginal wall — as the laboring woman broke her silence and howled in pain.

As blood dripped down her leg into a bucket, the sounds from the room became muffled and the voices of the nurses seemed to be dubbed — I couldn't match up their movements with the cries I heard. My head seemed to sway back and forth like a bobblehead doll. I saw the baby's black hair and then, clutching the wall, I slipped out of the room and onto the dusty cement.

"Breathe, breathe," I said to myself. "Pull it together!" Pushing my hands into the ground, my eyesight flicked on and off like a TV screen, then my knees buckled and I hit the cement.

A few minutes later, awake again and somewhat composed, I walked back into the room (while the nurses furrowed their eyebrows, confused about my absence) and saw a curious little shishu — a baby — lying on his mother's tummy, as the nurse cut his umbilical cord.

So, I missed it. Despite watching home birthing videos a few weeks prior, nothing could prepare my mind for the intensity of a live birth. I worried I would faint every time I tried to watch a birth — that perhaps I just couldn't handle it.

Sister Gillian lent me some grace over tea the next day. "Episiotomies are hard for anyone to watch," she said, cracking a smile. She's a woman of few words so I have to say the encouragement made me feel better.

Last night I photographed and observed two more deliveries. I even got to hold one 10-minute-old baby while the nurses prepared a bath.

The new baby, little Sumia, blinked her eyes open and jutted her fist into the air. Her lips parted into a wide smile before she fell sound asleep. Her exhausted mother slept on the delivery table, with an arm outstretched to her newborn. It was amazing and I didn't pass out once.

This story was first published on CLPmag.org