If you’re lucky, you’re off work today, enjoying the holiday. But some hardworking individuals are spending today, Labor Day, laboring over women in labor. They are the nurses who work in hospitals’ labor-and-delivery units.

For this Labor Day story, we decided to talk with three nurses who help women (and often, extended families) through the exciting, painful, joyful and occasionally sorrowful process of labor and delivery.

Registered nurse Kim Million, a labor-and-delivery nurse for about 12 years, asked another nurse to cover for her for a few minutes on Wednesday at Dupont Hospital so she could be interviewed.

She has a smile that conveys warmth and confidence, both qualities desirable in a nurse taking care of a laboring mother-to-be. She sat down in an empty birthing suite, noting it would be one of the few times she would sit for any extended period of time on her 12-hour shift.

“When you have someone in labor, you can’t say, ‘OK, you have to stop pushing, I have to go eat lunch,’” she said.

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