I'm a nurse. I work in a hospital. My chosen area of work is rooted in labor and delivery- bringing life into the world. My specialty is antepartum, taking care of the women in our area that are living with high-risk pregnancy. It's so fulfilling to get someone through a dangerous time of pregnancy to a place where she can deliver a baby that is ultimately going to be healthy. Our unit is a happy place 98% of the time. We do deal with death, and when we do it is devastating- but it's not as often as other areas of the hospital. Helping bring life into the world is indescribable, and what I always wanted to do.

That being said..... We had one hell of a night last night. Because of good ol' HIPPA, there's not too much I can say about the whole experience. And we've been hammered... I mean spoken to about posting about work experiences on public forums. Oh well; I'm still going to share. A little.

We're trained to deal with emergencies. On my floor, they drill into us what to do if we have a preemie deliver before we can get our pts to a labor room. We take neonatal resuscitation. We have scavenger hunts to find equipment (okay, only when they move something), and they have all kinds of "educational" signs posted everywhere....

So imagine our moment of panic when the emergency light went off in one of our rooms, and we ran in to find the patient care nurse trying to rouse her gray and unresponsive patient. She was a relatively fresh post-op pt with several underlying medical conditions. All I could think was thank god she's already delivered. Very loooong story short, sweet, with not too many details: My adrenaline flooded (especially since I was in charge.... ), we called a code- though she always had a pulse, there were a million people on my floor who were amazing, they got her responsive, and got her the hell off my unit.

After the rush faded back a little, and we were all debriefing I realized a couple things.
Just because our float nurses walk by the crash cart every day, it doesn't mean they remember where it is.
I know where everything is for a neonatal emergency in a heartbeat.... but not for a maternal emergency.
All the training falls into place, and we work amazingly as a team.

Thanks to my girls that were there tonight. We saved a life.
And if that never happens again, it'll be too soon.