Nursing Notes newsletter delivers a look at the Perinatal Nursing specialty. I got the chance to talk with this month’s Featured “Get to Know Nurse” Cyndy Krening. Cyndy’s a perinatal nurse specialist at Littleton Adventist Hospital in Littleton, Colorado and I asked her about how she got started as both a nurse and her interest in perinatal nursing.

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Jamie:                  Hi, Cyndy! Welcome to Nursing Notes Live.

Cyndy:          Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jamie:                  We’re going to talk a little bit about Perinatal Nursing this month. One of the questions I would have – and perhaps people don’t understand – perinatal nursing, is that just another word for “labor and delivery nursing” or is it more than that?

Cyndy:          It encompasses labor and delivery nursing but the word “perinatal” really is a broader term that means the time surrounding childbirth. It really encompasses the antepartum period, the antenatal period during pregnancy through labor, delivery and recovery and then the early post-partum period. It’s a broader term.

Jamie:                  First of all, how did you decide to become a nurse? Everybody has a story to tell. What drew you to the nursing career?

Cyndy:          I’ve been asked that a lot and I don’t have a very glamorous story for that. It was one of the situations where my high school counselor said, “What do you want to do?” I think, for years, I had said as growing up as a kid that I wanted to be a nurse. Yet, as I’ve looked back on that, I don’t recall having any specific thoughts of why I wanted to be a nurse. I feel like I had just always said that. Yet, as my journey unfolded, as I headed off to my bachelor’s program and now had a career in nursing, I do feel that that is absolutely was my calling and somehow subconsciously I must have known that from the start. I just had the sense that that’s what I should do and started on that journey and have felt that it was right from the start.

Jamie:                  Now, perinatal nursing, is that something you were involved with right out of school or is that something you found along the way after starting off maybe in Med-Surg or some other more traditional area?

Cyndy:          In nursing school, I got a little worried as we started doing clinicals because there were some clinical areas that I didn’t love being in. I thought, “Oh, gosh. What area of nursing is going to interest me?” Just as I began to worry, I had the opportunity to be in a couple of more acute care clinical areas like ER and then labor and delivery. Labor and delivery is one of those things that people either, I think, love or hate. I made that decision in nursing school that that was an area that I would really enjoy working in. Years ago, they didn’t hire new grads ever into labor and delivery. I ended up working my first couple of years actually on a neurology unit, which wasn’t my favorite at all, while I waited for the opportunity to get a job in labor and delivery. I’ve been a nurse for 31 years and 29 of it I’ve been on the OB arena.

Jamie:                  With the expansion of perinatal outside of the traditional labor and delivery realm, you really are dealing with the health of a family not just a mother and a new baby. Really there are so many aspects of a family’s connection with the mother and the new baby or babies – because we have lots of multiple births going on. What is your feeling about how you reach out to families as part of your job as a nurse?

Cyndy:          Well,