That is the question. And it has nothing to do with breastfeeding.
I’m debating my JOB, and quite frankly my CAREER after Taylor’s delivery.

I’m not sure I’ve done a great job articulating how Taylor’s delivery relates to me not wanting to be a nurse anymore. It’s a really complicated combination of feelings and triggers and emotions that I’m going to try to explain here, through debating the pros and cons of my current job. Those things are also combined with an already burnt out nurse, so her delivery was just kind of icing on the cake. My therapist pointed out that I’m kind of unintentionally doing like a forced immersion therapy because I keep going back to the same place and seeing the same people, which has probably complicated my healing. 

Numerous people have suggested to just get a new job… and trust me, I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve also worked at the same hospital for 10 years, so that thought provokes some anxiety in itself. But it’s more than that… the amount of times it comes up is something I wouldn’t realize if it didn’t make me scream inside every time… and I don’t know that nursing in another location or another specialty would change some of those triggers.

Other people have suggested I use my experience to change the way the hospital, and healthcare, treat pregnant women… and if you’ve read my post about nursing, my bitterness for the healthcare system shows through probably stronger than I’d like. The system doesn’t want to change, and I would both be burning myself out more and putting a target on my back if I tried to change it. (IMO, obviously) Instead, I started blogging to both help myself organize my feelings, and to hopefully help other women see that they are not alone, they have the strength to overcome what happened, and that its OKAY to be both happy and sad about your child’s birth… because that is something that took me a long time to realize ((I felt SO GUILTY for feeling such a negative way about my own daughter’s birth.))

But anyway… here it goes… I’m going to start with the negatives first, because they’re easier for me to think of lol, but also because then I’ll be ending on a positive note 😉

NEGATIVES:

1) Imagine you’re in pre-op the morning of surgery, all anxious, and you say to your nurse “OMG I’m so nervous! I’ve never had anesthesia before, have you? What’s it like?!” and I look at you and say “It was the worst experience of my life and I’ll never let anyone take care of me again” 😳😳 Yaaaaaa…. So I don’t do that. I bullshit through a smile while I’m screaming inside.

2) We do a LOT of gyn, gyn onc, and high risk OB cases. Basically anything with the combination of lady parts and anesthesia is enough to incite the silent screaming. Forget it if they have a working spinal. I. Can’t. Even. 🤢 Is it wrong to be jealous of your patient that their spinal worked?

3) I run into the teams that did my case, a lot, and without warning. I hear their voices from behind curtains, or bump into them rounding the corner, and my heart feels like it both stops and jumps out of my chest at the same time. I realize this part may change with a different job.

4) Peripheral nerve blocks and spinals are often used in other procedures like joint replacements and other random surgeries. Again, incite screams and palpitations any time there’s a mention of a regional block or spinal.

5) Any time a person is treated like a surgery, their family is forgotten about or left waiting, nobody explains to them what happened, or any related occurrence that resembles the care I got and the lack of care for the PEOPLE and FAMILY they were treating. This is a BIG one for me, it adds to my own nursing burnout because I try to make sure this isn’t happening to my patients… and it’s SO common in the hospital… unfortunately. (Everyone in the hospital needs and ADVOCATE and I regret very much not advocating for myself and Tay in our experience) I left the OR a post-op c-section, not a person who just had a huge important life event ripped away from her because of interventions she never wanted in the first place and quite frankly still doesn’t feel were necessary.

POSITIVES:

1) My direct managers are amazing and have been throughout this whole thing. I didn’t tell them at first… I hid the hurt from everyone at first because I felt guilty to feel such pain when I had such a beautiful baby. Everyone was asking how she was and I’m supposed to smile and say “shes amazing!!!” but I was at work and a bottled up mess of emotions so I just wanted to cry. When the triggers at work got the best of me, I hid in my manager’s office and cried and told it all. They encouraged me to speak to my team and to let them know how they can help me heal. The problem is, it’s not like one assignment is more triggering than another. As I tried to explain above, the triggers can be anywhere.

2) It’s easily the best work/life balance of any job I’ve ever had in terms of schedule, hours, workload…. I think this is mostly because I am casual (or per diem, whatever you want to call it)… so all the things people get frustrated with like scheduling and call and holidays and vacations… I don’t have to worry about which allows me to work around my family’s schedule. At the same time, it’s a very large and very busy unit so there is always the need for additional staff and I can easily work in enough hours each week for a decent paycheck. When we started our family I went to a casual position in order to make my family the priority, so this is mostly the reason I have stayed.

3) You get breaks!!! Lol I came from the emergency department… where a break was like “hey I’m gonna eat real quick can you make sure none of my patients die, or worse… FALL.. when I’m in the break room”, scarf down sandwhich, return to work while still chewing.

4) Patient flow… this is a must for me. I do not like having the same patient for 12 hours straight for however many shifts in a row. Some patients I would take, some I wouldn’t, and it’s a crap shoot, so I like areas with high patient turnover lol 🤷🏼‍♀️ that’s just me.

5) Patient population…. I feel like in general, PACU patients are very thankful and appreciative, which is what keeps me going. That’s why I became a nurse.

Besides these kind of job specific reasons… I just feel a general sense of betrayal from “them”, aka the place I’ve been running around busting my ass for for my entire adult life. I don’t know if that makes any sense… but I just felt betrayed by the place I work and the environment that prevails there. 🤷🏼‍♀️

So, maybe the connection between Taylor’s delivery and my nursing burnout is more clear, or maybe I confused you even more lol. One thing that I noticed through birth trauma support groups is that a lot of healthcare providers are there… and I wonder why that is. Do we have higher expectations of our colleagues? Are we more susceptible to birth trauma? Do we have a hard time giving up control and being the patient? Is it because we know how things CAN go? Just some thoughts. But hopefully the above ramblings made sense to at least one birth trauma mama or RN out there. 😘