Nurse backs talking therapy for helping her overcome fear of hospitals

Nicola Zolnhofer is head of nursing and quality for the older people and adult community directorate at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

“I found myself standing next to that nurses’ station with my fingers in my ears demanding to be discharged”

Nicola Zolnhofer

She turned to talking therapy support after being hospitalised last year with an infection, she said, because being admitted brought back traumatic memories of the birth of her daughter 14 years ago.

To coincide with this year’s Birth Trauma Awareness Week, Ms Zolnhofer, who became a Queen’s Nurse in 2013, said she had decided to tell her story to encourage others to seek help and support.

Writing about her experience in a blog, she said: “I’m a nurse and I look after people. For those few weeks last year, I became the patient.

“And I hope it proves that, as NHS staff, we’re not immune to needing to be looked after ourselves,” she said. “I hope my experience will inspire others, from all walks of life, to seek support.”

In June 2023, Ms Zolnhofer required hospital treatment after contracting pneumonia which had begun to affect her heart. However, the thought of being admitted triggered her PTSD.

Having been a community nurse for 17 years, she had actively avoided acute hospitals since the trauma of her daughter’s birth.

Despite worries about her condition, she admitted that she left the hospital – against clinical advice – and even worked the next day to “silence my mind from the PTSD symptoms”.

Ms Zolnhofer was subsequently recalled to hospital two days later following concerns over the results of blood tests.

“That put my anxiety levels off the scale, she said. “For the first two nights I didn’t sleep. All my senses were heightened. I couldn’t even stand the smell of the bedding.

“My mind was constantly telling me I wasn’t safe. I was having flashbacks relating to the traumatic birth of my daughter,” she said.

“At one point, I found myself standing next to that nurses’ station with my fingers in my ears demanding to be discharged.”

Following her discharge 10 days later, she said she recognised that she needed help and was referred to NHS Cambridgeshire Talking Therapies which is part of her trust’s mental health division.

For the next few weeks, she worked with Ilaria Meo, a high-intensity cognitive behavioural therapist, who treated her with eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) – a psychological treatment proven to treat the symptoms of PTSD.

Ms Zolnhofer said: “I can’t say I wasn’t sceptical. I know about physical health, but mental health treatment seemed like a mystery to me.

“I can’t pretend to understand the science behind it, but it has worked. After 13 weeks I was discharged. My PTSD symptoms have gone, and I couldn’t feel more relieved,” she said.

“It has not been about making me feel ‘happy’ about what happened to me during my daughter’s birth or taking away the feelings around it.

“For nearly a decade and a half, it was so traumatic I couldn’t even talk about it, but now I can and know how to deal with the feelings around it.”

The final goal to achieve for Ms Zolnhofer was to visit an acute hospital and get as close to a maternity unit as visitors were allowed.

She said: “Although the visitor policy meant I couldn’t actually go inside the maternity unit, I walked right up to the door, along every corridor, and up and down every staircase nearby.

“All of this would have been unthinkable just a few weeks before,” she said, describing her experience of talking therapies as “life changing”.

Ms Meo said: “I am so proud of Nicola. She has done remarkably well. Her story is truly inspirational and I hope it encourages others to come forward and refer themselves for talking therapies.”