Day in the Life of a Labor Nurse

Hey guys, let’s look at what it’s like to be a labor nurse and just a typical day of what this type of nurse experiences. All right. So first I want to tell you guys just some things to consider. So actually labor and delivery is considered a critical care. So you always have to be ready. There’s lots of emergencies that happen and lots of monitoring. So this area is considered critical care. Emergencies do happen. So you have to be really loving the adrenaline rush because a lot can happen and very quickly and unexpectedly.

Let’s go through a typical day. So first you’re going to get report on whatever patient you’re going to have. You might have some scheduled C-sections in the morning, um, or throughout the day, but typically they’re in the morning, so you’ll get report. Maybe have a few C-sections that you have to help be in, scrub for, circulate or whatever the role is at your facility. Pain management. So this is huge. So if you have a labor patient or a C-sections, just going to be helping to get that pain managed, help with getting the epidural in. You assist the anesthesiologists in holding the patient correctly or if they don’t want that, they want to use, just some other like medication like statol for their medication. Then you’re just going to help manage the patient’s pain, how they desire. You are constantly repositioning the patient, so you’re responding to the fetal heart rate and what it’s doing. You might have to adjust the bands on her belly that are holding the monitors, the baby has now spun from over here to over here. So now we gotta adjust the band to make sure we have it on the baby’s back and are measuring the heart rate correctly.

If the fetal heart rate is dropping, then we might need to reposition the patient and turn her to her left side or back to her right side or however, it may be to help fix that, um, heart rate. And then of course you’re going to assist with deliveries. So hopefully it’s your patient that gets the delivers. So you assist with that. A frequent assessment. So this is really important in, this happens a lot in a typical day. So especially our patients that are delivered. So if they’ve had their baby, we’re doing frequent fundal checks to make sure that that fundus is nice and firm and we don’t have a postpartum hemorrhage because all these patients are at a huge risk for that. So some special skills. So you have to work as a support person. Even if there’s a spouse, a partner, whoever in the room, um, the labor nurses looked at as being a huge support for that patient. They have been through this, they’ve seen delivery after delivery. So they need to know, you know, tell dad to, you know, put his hand here and massage back, whatever it may be. Just help to be that support person. Fetal monitoring, so you will learn this, don’t worry. You are going to learn how to read those fetal monitor strips so you can respond when that heart rate drops or all of a sudden is way too high. So you will get trained on that. And that’s really important. The other one is NRP our neonatal resuscitation program. We have a lesson on this. This is for baby resuscitation. Just kind of like your baby life or on basic life support, but for the newborn and the delivery. And even if you’re like, no, I’m a labor nurse, I’m not taking care of the baby.

You still have to know NRP to work in these fields so that you can be a helping hand. And then another special skill is multitasking. So some places, and even that, sometimes the doctor might not make it to the room. Some places the labor nurse catches the baby. So let’s say, uh, the doctor doesn’t make it. Who’s going to catch the baby? Well, that’s going to be you and your other labor friends. Um, usually that doesn’t happen, but it can, sometimes the facility is made that way where the labor nurses do the catching and take care of the patients. So you have to be able to get that baby delivered up on the moms, start the potatoes, then hand the doctor whatever they need. Um, so really being able to multitask. All right, some challenges that can happen, so much family drama can happen. So, um, whatever it may be, families don’t like each other.

You have drama between mom and dad. Um, there can be a lot of drama. So that’s a challenge. But I look at it as there’s drama everywhere, but just be ready for it. Unplanned delivery. So this can be a couple things. You have a woman that comes in off the street and she gets to be 10 centimeters. She’s ready to have a baby. You didn’t even get to introduce yourself right to the patient. She’s just coming in and having a baby so that it could be unplanned. We’ve had people that didn’t know they were pregnant and they’ve come in and had a baby. Um, it could also be people that are having babies that are, um, all of a sudden have a congenital anomaly that they were not expecting. So it was just unplanned. It wasn’t part of their plan for emergencies. So you have to be able to act fast. 

Like I said before you cannot be sitting around. Emergencies can happen so quick that all of a sudden that fetal heart rate drops and you have to be able to respond. And then another challenge, fetal demises. So this happens, there’s fetal death. People deliver stillbirths. You have people that maybe have a death shortly thereafter, needs to be that support person for that mother. So this does happen. I feel like they seem to come in threes that where I work, you know, we know like, okay, we’ll have a rough week where we have a few of them and then it’s better for a little while, but this happens. We one time had a mom come in and her cervix just wasn’t competent. She delivered a baby and it was at, I want to say around 23 weeks and that baby continued to have a heart rate for about an hour. The baby wasn’t really breathing or anything like that, but the heart was still pumping and she did not want to hold her baby. The baby wasnt at that point of viability and she did not want to hold her baby. She did not want to see her baby. And we had to respect that. We didn’t want to tell her that she might regret it. You know, you have to respect their wishes and we did not want that baby to be alone because it’s still had a heart rate. So I stood in the bathroom for 60 minutes and held that baby and it was hard. We did not want it just sitting in a box in a corner.

So fetal demises this happen and sometimes you have to do extra things, um, and be a part of that. So just make sure that that’s a challenge that you are able to face. So some other challenges that can happen are some unknown birth defects. Like I had mentioned before. Sometimes these patients don’t know that and that can be huge challenge to try to help talk them through it and be there for them. Pain control can sometimes be a challenge because everyone’s pain is different. Sometimes the pain management doesn’t work for one, like it does another. So it can be a challenge. Cooperation of the baby, sometimes those little suckers are flipping all over the place. They’re not getting into position the way that they should.

So this can be a challenge because you cannot just tell the baby to do it and it’s gonna do it. And then the last challenge I put here as birth plans. So it’s okay to have a birth plan, but sometimes it can be a challenge. Sometimes you have families that are expecting like all these different things that just can’t happen. Sometimes people come in with a birth plan that and you’re like, “Oh, we already do all that.” Like they want skin to skin the first hour or whatever. So sometimes it works out perfectly. We one time had a midwife who said that the birth plan of the family requested was that everybody in the delivery room was to be naked. Okay. The nurses, the doctors, nobody was doing that. And I know that that is crazy. Yes. But sometimes you’ll get patients like that. So these birth plants can sometimes be a challenge.

All right guys, so some key points here. It is a super rewarding job. You will have hard days, you will have great days. Um, I truly love working in the new life center and um, I hope that if it’s of interest of you that you get into the new life center and love it. So this image here, this is a freshly born newborn, just put up on the mom’s chest. So if you get all the feels when you see that picture, then this could be a great field for you.

Alright. We’d love you guys go out with your best selves today, and as always, happy nursing.