The Wintering Sessions: Leah Hazard on changing career after having her first child
Hello,
While we take a rest over the summer, we’re sharing some remastered episodes from Season One, chosen by listeners.
This week, I talk to Leah Hazard, NHS midwife extraordinaire and author of Hard Pushed, part memoir of Leah’s life on the labour ward, and part exploration of the current state of the profession.
Leah is as funny, wise and warm in person as she is in print, and she talks about the life-changing decision to leave her TV career and train to be a midwife, and the moment when the stress became too much during one very busy night on the ward.
References from this episode:
Leah’s Twitter
Leah’s Instagram
Leah’s book Hard Pushed
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Warmest wishes,
Katherine
Note: this email includes affiliate links which means I will receive a small commission for any purchases made
From the transcript
Leah Hazard: Yeah. The trick is just not letting it overwhelm you, I guess, and there certainly have been times on days off when all I can think about is something that's happened during my last shift, and it really, really niggles me, but that is just part of being an adult in the world, I guess. We all have things. We all have to encounter other people in our work generally or just in our daily lives, and we all have upsets.
Katherine May: It's sad but true. Yes, we do.
Leah Hazard: Yeah, it is, yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe for me, it's fair to say at times the stakes are maybe a little bit higher, but still, we all go through that in our own way, and the trick is just not to let it rankle, and to try and work it out somehow. So, I'm still learning about that.
Katherine May: But there was a point that you wrote about where the stress began to really get to you, I think.
Leah Hazard: Yeah. I mean, as I sort of went through the first few years of my career, I work in a really busy hospital. We have about six and a half thousand births a year.
Katherine May: That's an incredible number, isn't it?
Leah Hazard: Yeah, it's a lot of babies.
Katherine May: That's a lot of day, isn't it?
Leah Hazard: Yeah, it's a lot of day and we don't always have the staffing levels that I would like. I think it's okay to say that. As a working midwife, quite often your own needs come way down the pecking order in terms of what has to get done that day and what can get done, and most of my career I've worked in its triage department which is very busy and fast-paced. I describe it as A&E for pregnant people so it's always changing, it's always acute which is part of what makes it interesting and exciting, but also sometimes what makes it impossible.
So, yeah, I wrote about that sort of gradual feeling of pressure building, and I wrote about one particular night when it was a really busy shift, and the women just kept coming and coming and coming, and the hospital was full, and there were discussions about closing the hospital to new patients, and that wasn't done for one reason and another, and just became untenable, and I had what I now know, I can see it was a panic attack which probably sounds pretty boring and run of the mill to most people, but-
Katherine May: They're never boring and run of the mill when you're having them though.
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