sunshine1alb's blog: "A day in the life of a NICU nurse"

Sometimes doing what I do can be rewarding, sometimes difficult. My patient, baby E.C. was born without a heart rate, and wasn't breathing for 12 minutes.. Altough doctors and nurses got his heart beating again, he is not going to live. One of the most difficult things to do as a nurse is to be able to be there for the parents when their child is going to die, to comfort them... And it is important to let them hold their baby, no matter how many iv lines or tubes the baby has.. The thing that keeps me going is beliving that once they are gone, they go to heaven with the angels.. And the good stories of babies surviving and going home outweigh the bad..

Have you every had one of those days where you just wished you never got out of bed? Yesterday from the time I woke up until this morning when I went to bed was one of those days. Maybe it had something to do with Sunday being my fourth twelve hour night shift in a row, or maybe it was only getting five hours of sleep for the last several days.. Whatever the reason I am glad it is over :)It started up with waking up too early, at 1:30pm after going to sleep around 8:30 or 9.. Since I couldn't go back to sleep, I ended up spending too much time on here and going to get my hair cut.. (which I am not totally sure if I like yet). When I got back from getting my hair cut, one of my cats puked o the floor, so I had to clean that up.. Once I got to work I found out that I was the only nurse in the room with the sick infants to have three patients.. It seemed all of them required lots of work.. While I was running around caring for my patients I discovered that nurses in the 'easy' room with babies getting ready to go home only had three babies as well..hmm something wrong with this picture :) I was going at a steady clip until five am when doing my last patient round on a surgical patient.. When I opened up her diaper I discovered her colostomy bag had come off from the skin and leaked into her surgery incision.. It took around 30 minutes to get her situated so she could even get her bottle.. and of course she chose 530am to be slower with her feeding than usual..With the help of my coworkers, I was able to get done with my work on time.. I live around 10 miles from work, so I normally take a specific way home that I am familiar with.. Well this morning I decided to try a different way.. and lo and behold, streets in hollywood by my place of work go around in circles instead of strictly north and south.. so I wasted 15 minutes driving around and ended up taking the same road home anyway...I was so tired I was having difficulty driving home. Lesson learned: I need more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep each day when working four nights in a row :)