Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month: The Nurse's Story

To start this post I think it is important to go back in time to when I was in nursing school. Most of my fellow classmates could attest to the fact that Labor and Delivery was not a place where I wanted to do a rotation. I worked very hard to stay out of that area much to my instructors dismay. On my very last day of  my clinicals I was in the crazy circumstance of delivering a baby by myself in the bathroom (that is a whole other post in itself)! Of course that just solidified that I was NEVER going to EVER set foot in a Labor and Delivery Unit AGAIN!
Fast forward to my first job as a new grad nurse. The hospital that I was to work at didn't have any internships available in any of my desired units (E.R., ICU, or Cardiac Unit) but as luck would have it (well not my luck anyway) they did have an internship in Labor and Delivery. My initial thought was you must be kidding me?! Actually I don't think it was a thought I believe I actually spoke those words out loud to the HR person. And so I began my journey in Labor and Delivery, always telling myself it was temporary until a position opened up in another department. I finished my 9 months of internship successfully (with some VERY interesting stories) and was released by my preceptor to be on my own. Three months later I experienced one of the worst days I had ever had up until that point.
I will never forget that day. We had just changed shifts and the first patient to come up from E.R. was a 21 week pregnant woman with fever of 103 and cramping. I was up for the first admission. After labs were sent, IV was started, formal ultrasound was done and monitoring was taking place it was resulted that the woman was suffering a severe case chorioamnionitis and delivery was imminent. Without getting into the details of that day the woman and I bonded over my 12 hour shift. She was close to delivering when it was getting close to the end of my shift and I could not leave her to go through this situation after I had spent all day talking and consoling her with the impending outcome of her situation. And so I stayed. NICU personnel was present for the delivery on the small hope this baby would be big enough to save but sadly it was not. The doctor wrapped the baby in a blanket and presented it to it's mother and then had to leave for an emergency cesarean. And so I sat and held this mother while she held her baby whispering loving words while silent tears ran down her face and my own. After the baby had passed and when she was ready, I took the baby to take pictures for her, make a footprint sheet and make her one of our memory boxes that we present mothers who have delivered stillborns. It was excruciating. She hugged me for a long time and then it was time to move her to another floor. After having been at the hospital 18 hours I drove home and on the way I called my mom. She listened while I cried. I cried for that poor mother, I cried for the baby and I cried at the cruelty of the situation.
My very last stillborn case was close to the end of my time in Labor and Delivery. It was a woman who had come in that night for an induction of labor being full term and meeting the criteria for induction. As with every mom who comes in I immediately started to attach our contraction monitor and fetal heart rate monitor. As I was searching for a heart beat the seconds turned into minutes. She looked at me and said he likes to hide sometimes and smiled but my heart began to sink. I asked another nurse to try and find heart tones while I called the doctor who ordered a STAT ultrasound. The tech arrived to do the scan and as she was looking the doctor came in the room. The three of us were studying the ultrasound monitor screen as the tech was searching. You could watch the happiness leaving the woman's face as she looked to all of us hoping to see some reassurance. When the doctor had to tell her the baby no longer had a heart beat, the happiest day of this woman's life suddenly became one of the worst.  The crying and pleading with questions of "why" were haunting. It was a horribly heart breaking situation.
In my years as being a Labor and Delivery nurse I had no words for people who would talk about how wonderful it was to work in such a lovely department and never have to experience the kinds of events other nurses did on the other floors and areas in the hospital. And I would just smile but I had no response because working in L&D was such an emotionally taxing area to work in. We either had the best days or we had the worst days. I remember every single mother I took care of who experienced loss. I grieved for them and with them as any person would but it wasn't until I got a small glimpse at what they were going through that I understood the heart break that kind of loss could cause. Seven years later I would experience my first pregnancy loss and go down that dark path of grief as a mother.......

To Be Continued