I knew I was taking a risk when I got pregnant with my fifth child, who would be delivered via my fifth c-section. Because I’m a labor nurse, I really knew what I was taking on when I got pregnant that last time; I wasn’t naïve enough to think that I was invincible.
Several weeks into the pregnancy, my anxieties and worries about those risks became even stronger. Maybe it was my nursing education and experiences, or maybe it was motherly instinct, but I just knew something wasn’t right. At my 19 week anatomy scan, my suspicions were confirmed: I had a placenta previa. My regular, healthy pregnancy was instantly categorized as high-risk.
They say nurses make the worst patients. Maybe it’s because sometimes they don’t take their own advice, or maybe it’s because they can be overly critical of the care they receive. Maybe it’s because they worry too much about taking care of other people to take care of themselves. But one thing is absolutely for sure: they make the worst patients because they know too much.
As soon as I realized my worries were justified during my ultrasound scan, tears flooded my eyes as my mind was filled with everything I knew about this particular complication.
The next few months were filled with doctor appointments and ultrasounds. The concerns were real. The stress was palpable. Lists and lists of questions were formed. My OB (who knew me not only because he had delivered my babies, but because I also worked alongside him in the labor unit) and I formed plans as best as we could, if anything … for my own peace of mind.
Of course, things don’t always go as planned.
“Could you just stop being a nurse until after you deliver, please?” my doctor said to me while we discussed my fate during an appointment following my first bleeding episode. A little nurse-curse humor helped, but we both knew that it would have been a luxury that we just couldn’t afford at that moment in time.
At 32 weeks gestation, I bled again and needed to be hospitalized. Because the labor unit I worked on at that time had recently lowered their NICU status (much to my chagrin), I could not be admitted to the unit that was my home away from home. While I would still be under the care of my physician, I wasn’t going to be taken care of by my friends and co-workers. I wasn’t going to be holed up in a place where I knew the routines, the smells, and the sounds of “my” hospital.
I had to go to the “other” hospital and be a “real” patient.
I remember that first night as a “real” patient: I laid awake in a hospital bed, hearing fetal heart tones from the room next door and mentally picturing the fetal monitoring strip. I almost ran out of my room to help when I heard a mother (obviously in transition labor) scream in pain right outside of my room’s door. It was the middle of the night on a labor unit and my mind, body, and soul were wide awake, being held back from doing the things that I normally did when I found myself on a labor unit in the middle of the night. Instead, I was confined to a single room, held up in my bed by my SCDs (aka … leg squeezers), only allowed to get up to go to the bathroom.
Surprisingly, being treated in my area of expertise was the most alien and unnatural thing for me to experience. I quickly learned that being a patient in the hospital after a normal, healthy pregnancy and delivery is one thing (it’s almost like a vacation …), and being a patient in the hospital as a high-risk or “sick” patient for days-turned-into-weeks is another (it’s kind of like prison …)
While I knew I was where I needed to be and had accepted it long before I found myself admitted, and even though it didn’t take long for me to fall into a routine and become familiar with my new surroundings and the new faces taking care of me, the entire experience was one of the most difficult almost-four-weeks of my life. Never in my life had I experienced stress, anxiety, and worry as much and as often as I did in those days as an antepartum patient … as a “real” patient. 
Now, when an expectant mother walks onto the unit I’m working on, I understand completely the full range of emotions she is experiencing – complicated pregnancy or not. I empathize with her fear of the unknown and her anxiety of being in a strange place, having anonymous and unfamiliar people surrounding her.
Being a labor nurse is, and always will be, a part of who I am. The nurse that I am is made up of many valuable traits, some of which being my education, the countless clinical hours with various patients over so many years, and the interaction and guidance from more experienced co-workers.
While time spent with each and every patient helps me grow as a nurse, one of the most invaluable characteristics that make up the nurse that I am now … is my time spent as the patient.
