For just a few hours recently, Rose Marie Bertrand was unreachable. The Madison doula - or birth assistant - didn't have a pager on her. "I drowned my pagers," she said after her morning swimming pool walk. Being on call is the worst part of Bertrand's job. "I'm constantly working in circumstances when you never know when the event is going to occur," Bertrand said. "What a doula does is provide a variety of ways to ease and speed labor."

But the best part of her job, helping women give birth, more than makes up for always waiting for the call. "It's wonderful to be in a room when a baby is born," Bertrand said. "Women get this incredible look on their faces. It's partly relief and partly realizing their child is here and happiness. ... The coolest thing is I get to see men in a way people don't usually get to see - when their emotions are at the surface."

Since 1978, Bertrand, 60, has helped women through 140 births, mainly at Madison's St. Mary's and Meriter hospitals. Most of those births were after 1996 when Bertrand's doula practice and her volunteer practice stepped up. She likes to attend two to three births a month.

A former childbirth educator, Bertrand took an intensive three - day course to learn to be a doula. Doulas assist mothers and families during labor by using massage, acupressure, heat and cold to ease the pain of labor and various positions to speed it along. They don't do any medical work but can answer questions about the normal course of labor.

Although being a doula is a full-time job for Bertrand, she's definitely not in it for the money. In her paid practice, families pay about $450 for her to attend the birth and help them plan what kind of birth they want. She made less than $4,000 last year. Most of her work comes from an organization she and other doulas in southern Wisconsin founded, called Small Miracles. Small Miracles is a nonprofit group that provides doula services for incarcerated and poor pregnant women. "What I'm about with those mothers is giving them those good memories," Bertrand said. "I tell the girls I could do a birth video that's either G-rated or X-rated. They love that."

Because she's busy meeting with expecting mothers and helping with deliveries, Bertrand said she doesn't have enough time to do all the paperwork needed to apply for grants to try to expand the organization. Right now, Small Miracles is trying to get a grant to train people who can speak both Spanish and English as doulas.

A number of Bertrand's clients come from the Madison School District's School Age Parenting Program, where she speaks each quarter and offers every student a chance to have a doula attend their birth for free. "Some girls have no parents at all or anyone to support them and she helped them deliver and was supportive," said Lesa Reisdorf, department chairwoman of the School Age Parenting Program. "The whole idea of what she does is fascinating to me. She's knowledgeable and she's so into it but on top of that to volunteer her services for these girls."