I have been a perinatal nurse for more than two years. Most people tend to think that everything in perinatal care is beneficial and miraculous. Most of the time, they are, but at that time there will be pain like pregnancy, despair of no children and even sorrow of death.

Being assigned to a triage, on a clear day, it seems to be busier than usual. I check the patient after the patient. However, by lunch time, I had managed to clean all the beds and decided to eat fast food. When I was about to leave, a patient walked through the door and then to her family.

When I followed the little patient to the triage, I couldn't even say she was pregnant. Her nervous voice told me that she should have data for tomorrow, but she had not felt her baby moving since the night before. I put the baby monitor on her pregnant belly and I didn't hear anything. I immediately knew that the baby was no longer alive in her body. However, I don't want to give up. I moved the monitor around my little belly again and again, just hope I got some indications of my baby's heartbeat.

Mother knows. She held her husband's hand and sobbed softly. Between the weeping, she wants to see her mother waiting for her outside the triage. Just as I approached her, she looked up at me and said, "The baby is gone, right?" As a nurse, I really can't say anything to her. Instead, I held her tightly and took her to the triage, telling them that the doctor would soon be on the road.

My heart is suffering for the parents who lost their first child, and the grandmother who lost the first big child. The doctor arrives and pulls the ultrasound machine to the patient's bedside to visualize the baby's still and silent heart. This time, the end of the situation sank, everyone can see on the monitor that the baby's heart is no longer beating. Everyone cried again. My only gratitude is that at that moment, the mother got the support of her loved ones around her, and the remaining beds in the room were also empty. It is never good to hear the cry of the mother who lost the baby.

For a nurse, it is not easy to help a patient with a full-term intrauterine death by giving birth. Most of the people we work in this field have already completed this work at some point. Although we know the degree of pain experienced by patients and their families, our bodies and emotions as nurses are equally broken. You can't provide any comfort words to ease her pain or be able to provide her with any closure. The rest is the emptiness after experiencing every pain and emotion brought by the baby into the world.

We are doing well as a nurse. We have been praying that she does not need to be discharged from the uterus with a transverse scar to go home as a permanent reminder every day, telling her what she experienced during childbirth.

For patients, we are just a momentary guide to one of the most painful times in their lives. They won't remember everything we said or everything we did. They will never know that we are crying for them, alone in an empty room where we will not be seen. Although we have seen this many times in the way we work, I can tell the truth, I remember each of them.

This is just to let all the mothers who have not taken the children home to let your nurse remember you, and always thank some of you for being left in the labor room.

Beyond birth and baby care was originally published on Spring