Q:
What inspired you to become a nurse?
A:
I always wanted to help people, particularly women. Nursing gives us a unique opportunity to connect with individuals as well as guide them through their particular journeys.
Q:
What do you love most about being a nurse?
A:
What I love most about being a nurse is the relationships I develop with my patients. I also love the people that I work with, but being able to follow women through pregnancy and delivery is particularly rewarding.
Q:
What’s a typical day like for you as a certified nurse midwife?
A:
I get to guide women through pregnancy, through gynecological problems, and probably the most exciting part of my day is that I get to deliver babies.
I work 2–3 days a week in our women’s health clinic, seeing primarily pregnant women. Those days are roughly 8-hour days and I’ll see anywhere from 20–45 patients. On the other 1–2 days that I work, I’m up on Labor and Delivery for 12-hour shifts. I triage pregnant women who come in with problems or to check to see if they are in labor. I manage their labor and deliver their babies. The clinic days are busy but more predictable, L&D is less reliable — while sometimes we have the opportunity to take it slow, we’re often running around trying to catch our breaths!
Q:
What’s your advice for someone just starting out as a nurse?
A:
I always tell the new nurses that it’s going to get better. It’s a challenge being a new nurse, you know, it’s really—as much education that you get in school, really most of your individualized training is on the job. So, you always want to look for a hospital or an area that’s going to give you a lot of training, because that’s really where you’re going to learn.
Q:
How do you balance work and life as a nurse?
A:
I try to take a few minutes for myself. I like to run, that kind of blows off a little bit of steam, and try to remember that as I was racing to try to make it here today, everything will wait.
You want to find the seasoned nurses and latch onto them, learn their good habits, and try to stay away from some of the bad habits.
Q:
Can you share any examples of how nurses innovate?
A:
We often have a situation where we’re—as nurses on the front line, we’re kind of the first ones to notice a problem, and you have to kind of act before you wait for help to arrive. So, I’d say pretty regularly on labor and delivery, you have a patient that needs to go back to the OR, and by the time—if the attending physician is, he’s back up there, the patient is wheeled and ready to go because the nurses are the ones who have noticed what’s going on.
