I want to be honest about something, because the easy version of this story isn't the true one: I didn't leave labor and delivery because I stopped loving it. I left because it taught me what I loved even more.
For years, L&D was my whole world, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. There is almost nothing like being in the room for the first few minutes of a brand-new life. The held breath, then the cry, then the way an entire family rearranges itself around a person who didn't exist an hour ago. I helped women through terror and exhaustion and the kind of joy that knocks people sideways. It's sacred work. Leaving it was one of the harder professional decisions I've made, and I didn't make it lightly.
But here's the thing L&D kept showing me, over and over, until I couldn't unsee it. We would pour everything, every resource, every ounce of attention, into one enormous, dramatic moment. And then we'd send these women home into the long, unglamorous aftermath largely on their own. The bone-deep exhaustion. The slow, strange physical recovery nobody quite prepares you for. The way a woman's energy and sense of self could take months to come back, if anyone bothered to help her tend to it at all. The big event got the spotlight, the staff, the urgency. The long recovery got a six-week checkup and a good-luck.
I started to notice which part of the work pulled at me most, and it wasn't the dramatic peak, much as I loved it. It was that quieter, longer stretch. The slow rebuilding. Helping someone feel like herself again, not in a single climactic moment but over weeks and months of small, attentive care. Supporting energy and recovery and the ordinary day-to-day wellbeing that determines whether a person is actually okay. That's the work that kept tugging at my sleeve.
That tug is what eventually pulled me toward wellness, and toward building Salt & Serum with Arian. We go back to nursing school at Nova Southeastern, where we did our degrees and training and discovered, somewhere between study sessions, that we shared the same frustration with how healthcare is built. So much of it is engineered for the crisis, the dramatic, billable, urgent moment, and so little of it is built for the long middle stretch where people actually live their lives. The recovery. The maintenance. The slow drift of energy and metabolism that nobody flags until it becomes a real problem.
Wellness work lets me live in that middle stretch full-time. Helping a new mom claw her way back to feeling human. Helping a woman in her forties understand why her body suddenly plays by different rules. Supporting recovery and hydration and the basics that quietly run the whole show. And honestly, it uses everything labor and delivery taught me, just aimed at a different season. Because L&D wasn't only about catching babies. It was about caring for women through enormous physical transitions, watching their bodies do hard things, and helping them come back to themselves on the other side. That skill didn't expire when I changed settings. It just found a bigger field to work in.
People sometimes assume I must have gotten burned out, or that L&D got too intense, and I gently correct them, because it wasn't an escape from something. It was a move toward something. I didn't run from the delivery room. I followed a thread that started there, the part of the work that was about the long recovery rather than the big moment, all the way to a practice built around exactly that.
I'll carry the L&D years with me forever. The first cries, the families, the women who let me be part of the scariest and most wonderful hours of their lives, none of that leaves you. But I found the work I was actually looking for, and it turned out to be the quiet part I'd been drawn to all along. The aftermath. The rebuilding. The slow, unglamorous, deeply satisfying work of helping someone feel well again. That's where I belong, and I'm grateful L&D is what showed me the way there.