Pregnant RN in acute psych setting...staying on the job?

[misssarahRN]

I'm about 10 weeks pregnant with my 1st. This hasn't been what I believe people call "an easy pregnancy". I am seriously considering quitting or something, because my current job( but it may just be working as an RN) and being pregnant don't seem to be compatible and I need a little perspective from other psych nurses that have been pregnant while on the job.

I started having morniong sickness since I found out at week 5 and each day is worse than the last. I have the undercurrent of nausea all the time, but I usually don't get enough notice to actually make it to the bathroom (or pull off the road for that matter) to throw up. I only been working Per diem according to my contract lately( 6 shifts/month, 2 have to be night and/or weekend), but between rounds or med chasing (cause it's more about chasing the patient down to give them meds then "passing" them to them) I am so exhausted at the end of the shift that it sets off my morning sickness. I haven't worked a shift in weeks in which I didn't promptly throw up afterward (I can't even make the 2 mintue drive home before up-chucking) and it usually leaves me doubly sick the day after. Even if I don't do anything, but sit in my bathrobe I still end up being sick at least once, usually twice.

It might not be so bad if my hospital were what usually comes to mind when you think of a hospital- clean and brightly lit with clean easy-to-access bathrooms all of which are thoroughly cleaned on a daily basis. My hospital looks like it was pulled out of the 3rd world. It's so DIRTY, smelly and gross and I am honestly shocked we haven't been fined over it. The carpets are stained black and haven't been replaced in 30+ years (plus who has carpet in an inpatient acute psych setting?) There is one common bathroom in public areas for each unit and it's always under lock and key (lest a patient get into trouble or something worse in their). The patient bathrooms are beyond gross! They only get cleaned when a patient makes a big deal about it or does something outragously gross in there. There are splatters of bodily fluid in common areas that I have looked at for months (actually it was almost a year when the hall was finally repainted). Also the patients tend to smell terrible and so far are a quick trigger for the mroning sickness. And don't even get me started on the dust with our acient ventilation system and the pregnancy rhinitis with post nasal drip that triggers my gag reflex.

There's no real expectation on acuity anymore. Because we are not a medical hospital, we have limits (theoretically) to the type of medical acuity we are allowed to process. We didn't use to accept pregnant patients, catheters of any kind (IV, indwelling, etc), medically unstable, level 2 and 3 sex offenders, misdemeanor or worse criminals, or the non-ambulatory. All of which we have had in the past 9 months. The staffing and acuity have gotten so bad that, prior to becoming pregnant, I had reached the mindset that any given night I might walk in and have to say, "nope, just not doing it...I quit".

Now impending motherhood doing what it does, I don't want to quit if I'm just being a wuss. I've got a baby to help provide for (my husband works and does well enough so that I am able to work per diem), so I'm just having a hard time telling if I'm being spoiled or if my facility is just too intense for me right now. I realize that I'm in my 1st trimester and this could all end in few weeks, but I'm feeling pretty lame because I'm the most recent of about 10-15 women to be pregnant at my hospital this year. All but the last 3 had easy pregnancies- one got into car accident causing preterm labor then strep, another (a nurse manager) had kidney stones while on the floor and preterm labor, another (also a nurse manager) got put on bed rest for undisclosed complications.