The Biggest Day

Jessica Benzing, a Mary Greeley labor and delivery nurse, describes the joy and occasional heartbreak of her job.

I have been a labor and delivery nurse for seven years. I get really excited when people ask what I do for a living because I LOVE my job. I’m so proud of the work that I do. What a privilege it is to be there for the biggest day of a family’s life! 

Nothing compares to witnessing the miracle that birth is. Women are just amazing. Everything they have endured to get to this point and all that they must do to get their baby (or babies!) Earthside is testament to their strength. It never gets old! 

I am passionate about making my patients’ birth stories as positive as they can be. Birth is such a transformative experience in a woman’s life. I want my patient and their family to feel like I am on their team, and we are in this together. It is important to me to make sure patients feel heard, safe, and informed. 

It is said that an obstetrics unit, like Birthways at Mary Greeley, is a great place to work about 90 percent of the time. And it’s true—my job is usually a joyous and happy place to be. However, there are variables in pregnancy, labor, and birth that are outside anyone’s control. Sometimes things go wrong. Usually the complications are minor; fixable. But sometimes the complications are catastrophic, and there is nothing anyone can do to fix them. What does that mean? Families don’t always get to take their baby home. Sometimes babies are born still. This is the hardest part of my job. And it never gets easier. 

These are families that labor and delivery nurses never forget. We remember their faces. We remember their baby’s names. We collect as many things as we can to send home with our grieving families: pictures, footprints, handprints, wisps of hair, weights and measurements, something with their baby’s name on it. These births are very difficult to recover from as a nurse. While this circumstance is not happening to us, we experience loss alongside that patient. We are grieving too. Coming back after a shift like that is overwhelming—some nurses don’t come back. 

Rediscovering the joy in our job again is why we stay. Joys such as caring for the family that finally got their miracle IVF baby, the adoptions that complete a family, the parents that got their rainbow baby, dads that cry at deliveries, patients that you took care of with their last baby and they still remember you. Birth matters. And it is such a privilege to be there for it all.