Long-Time Labor & Delivery Nurse Shares How Finally Giving Birth Herself “Humbled” Her

There’s a (generally good-natured) joke in healthcare that nurses make the worst patients. I don’t know how true that is, but I can also imagine it’s hard to switch over from caregiver to the person receiving care. But it can give you valuable insight that, in the end, can make you an even better nurse. TikTok creator and new mom Neda (@hijabiluscious/) is an experienced nurse, having spent five years in labor and delivery before becoming a nurse practitioner. But despite her years of hard-won expertise, she says, “Being a labor and delivery patient two weeks ago absolutely humbled me as a medical provider.”

“I am not saying you have to give birth to be a good labor and delivery nurse,” she clarifies. “There are plenty of ICU nurses that are amazing and have never had a heart attack. Similarly, I’ve worked with nurses who’ve had five kids and somehow lack compassion for their patients.”

But during the course of her induction, labor, and birth, she discovered that some long-held truths she’d believed as a nurse did not hold up to her experience or expectations as a mom. For example: the impossibility of sleeping in a hospital and the trickle down effects of insomnia.

Between alarms, codes going off (which was difficult for her, as a nurse, to tune out since she a) knew what they meant and b) had spent her whole career immediately leaping to action upon hearing them), and the general hubbub of a hospital, it doesn’t matter if you have the lights off in your room.

“It didn’t matter that on the first day of induction with cytotec was painless,” she says. “I still could not sleep.”

By the time she was ready to push, she’d been awake for 36 hours.

“Before my experience, I had completely underestimated how much energy it actually takes to push, and while suffering from insomnia?!” she marveled. “Even on a normal, not pregnant day at home, if I had suffered from insomnia the night before I am not working out: I am too tired. But here I was expected to push a baby for three hours while on no sleep.”

She’s also broken with her birth plan and decided to opt for an epidural (whomst among us...?), but she soon discovered that they did not work exactly as advertised.

“In all my years of doing labor and delivery, I was under the impression that the epidural would allow me to sleep,” she explains. “Wrong!”

Sure, some people can sleep with an epidural: poor Neda was not one of them. Between the all-too-common labor shakes and the feeling of needing to take a monumental poo (IYKYK), there was no time to sleep before pushing.

“Which brings me to another lie that I was taught,” she says saucily. “That pressure does not equal pain. Yes the hell it does!”

She says she had a “great epidural.” But while the worst of the pain was managed it could not prevent intense rectal pressure that comes along with a baby descending into the birth canal. If you don’t believe me that that’s a thing, go ahead and just look at a diagram of a woman’s pelvis and note how close together everything is internally. It is not pleasant, especially on 20+ hours of no food and 30+ hours of no sleep.

“My ability to push was running on sheer will power and delusion,” she jokes-but-isn’t-joking. She started nodding off between contractions, she couldn’t take directions from her care team very well, she continued to feel intense rectal pressure, and she doesn’t exactly recall how everything went down.

“And I just might do the same thing all over again in two years,” she concludes. “Because postpartum amnesia is real.”

I don’t know if nurses actually make the worst patients (sounds like Neda did pretty amazing despite going through it), but I do think anyone providing care can only benefit from really understanding a patient’s point of view.