Can LVNs work in Labor & Delivery?

Labor and delivery nurses does your work effect your personal life?

• Any L&D nurses out there... I was just wondering if your job effected your own experience with pregnancy/delivery? Were you more scared to go into labor, or did you feel more comfortable with it? I have one child, and I am going to school to get my RN and I want to specialize in L&D... my husband and I plan on having another child within the next 3-5 yrs I just wonder if I will have different views or a different experience after working as a L&D nurse. Thanks!

• Answer:

  I'm not an L&D nurse, and I'm not sure how many you will find on here. I'm an LPN and originally went to school intending to become a Certified Nurse-Midwife. I had both of my babies outside of a hospital setting. I was blessed with normal, low-risk pregnancies and gave birth with the help of CNM's at a free-standing birth center. I believe very strongly in the ability of women's bodies to birth their babies. As with anything else in life, things can go wrong. But since most risk factors can be predicted with thorough prenatal care and managed through appropriate monitoring during labor, I do not believe it is justified to treat every pregnancy like an emergency waiting to happen. I was shocked to discover how much in the minority I was when I went to nursing school. I learned in the hospital that it is routine for *all* laboring women to be hooked up to IV's and lie down for hours on end due to the continuous fetal monitoring (at least in our hospital, I know some do intermittent monitoring). Most women "need help" getting the baby out, whether through the whopping 30% c-section rate, or through episiotomies and vaccuum extractors. I believe the hospital environment where I had clinicals is very fear based, not so much evidence based. Statistically, over 90% of low-risk women who attempt birth outside of a hospital with a midwife succeed without medical/surgical interventions. Those same women in a hospital seem almost guaranteed to "need" interventions since high-risk and low-risk women are treated the same. I can understand why those who work in the hospital and have never been exposed to different types of births (except home-birth transfers) have come to believe that birth is inherently dangerous. I didn't go into nursing with this view and I haven't come out of it with this view. L&D nurses tend to be the other way around. They see everything that can go wrong, from complications due to common problems such as gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, to drug and alchohol users and women who walk in having had no prenatal care. Even when these factors do not apply to them personally, they often feel that childbirth is a pretty scary event.