In spite of the frustrations faced daily by most nurses, there are certain things that keep me coming back to my job day after day. This is about those things....
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I'm a mother/baby nurse and proud to be one. Compared to lots of units, we mother/baby folks might be considered lucky to have such 'cake' jobs, and some days I'd agree. Other days I leave work exhausted, with sore feet, sore back, dry mouth, empty stomach, and full bladder from running between one crisis and another. We do have our fair share of crises; when they are bad, they are really bad. But this isn't about those crises, nor about the frustrations we encounter as mother/baby nurses. This entry today is about the things that remind me why I do this job and why I love it. Please forgive the mixture of generalities and anecdotes; I hope you will find something in here that strikes a note of internal recognition for you.
I love it when I take care of parents who are genuinely happy about their new baby. While I recognize that we all express emotion differently, it never fails to hit me right in the solar plexus when I see a daddy hold his baby for the first time and his eyes well up with tears. Or a grandma who stays up all night holding and soothing her laboring daughter, doing it as much to comfort her baby as she's doing it to be one of the first to welcome her new grandbaby.
I love it when women's bodies do what they are sometimes told they can't do. I love it when someone comes in and delivers a breech baby lady partslly too quickly for anyone to tell her she 'needs' to be in the OR, almost like her body is saying, "C-section? Pffft!!!" Or when a primipara delivers her 10-pound baby over an intact perineum (I've only seen it rarely, but I have seen it).
I love it when patients refuse things we do in the hospital that aren't really as necessary as we are fond of making them out to be. I like being able to be the one who backs them up when they do this, too.
Watching breastfeeding work is almost magical for me. More times than I can count I have a baby who would make a great breastfeeder (which is most of them) but mom doesn't want to, which is of course her decision to make. Or I have a mom who desperately wants to breastfeed but baby isn't very interested, or is in NICU and not stable enough to feed (in which case Mom pumps, but it's nowhere near the same thing). Or baby is a great nurser and mom is motivated, but there is some other issue - very sore nipples, or milk supply issues, or jaundice that necessitates a bilibed, which can take away from the closeness of the breast. What I love seeing happen is the combination made in heaven: a baby who wants to nurse, a mother who responds to that, and no complications in between. It's the way things are meant to work and for me, it is one of the things I wish I could put on display in a museum. (I'm not faulting people for having breastfeeding difficulties, please don't misunderstand. Sometimes things happen that aren't failure on anyone's part.)
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but for whatever reason I bond well with young teen moms. Your guess as to why is as good as mine, but we tend to get along really well. A few years ago, I took care of a girl who was with us for about a week as an antepartum in preterm labor at 27ish weeks. After she delivered her baby a few days later, I took care of her postpartum as well. She amazed me in so many ways. She pumped every three hours while awake and insisted that I wake her every three hours to pump at night as well. She insisted on carrying the milk over to NICU herself just so she could say hi to her baby in the process. We talked about her life and her goals. She hadn't been dealt the best deck of cards to begin with, and hadn't really planned on having a baby before finishing high school. The baby's dad had long since dropped her. I had more free time than usual those couple nights and spent as much time talking with her as I could without her kicking me out of her room. I did my best to encourage her - her goals were worthy ones, and while she might have to rearrange her priorities to include her new son, she owed it to herself to not give up on those goals. Before I left that last morning, I went in one last time to check on her, and she was asleep, so I wrote a note on a paper towel letting her know I'd be thinking of her and her baby in the weeks/months to come, and signed my first name to it.
Fast-forward several years. About six or eight months ago, I was working in the nursery and the phone rang. "Elvish, it's for you," called the tech. I answered and it was this former patient. Clearly she had kept the note and asked for me by name. "I just wanted you to know I remember what we talked about," she told me. She related how she graduated from high school, was currently studying to be a beautician, and that her premie son was now a healthy, well-adjusted four-year-old. "And I just wanted to let you know that we made it and we are okay." (As you can probably imagine, the tears turned on like the fanciest faucet; fortunately, the nursery wasn't busy at the time.)
When I have an awful, frustrating day and swear I am going to quit my job, these are some of the things I try to remember. What about you? What inspires you about your job? What keeps you coming back?
