Days 82-89: NICU, Shame, and ER

I first would like to start with an apology to my regular readers (all one of you) for my lack of consistency. You see I have been very sick, with God knows what, and I have had some shameful events take place. I will relate them all to you because I feel it is therapeutic to share my mistakes, now that I am sort of over them and have corrected them. So here we go!

Day 82: The NICU! Little tiny sick babies!! The desk nurse was none to happy to have a student that day, but oh well for her. The nursed that I shadowed was very nice...her English, not so much. We were to take care of a set of twin boys and a little girl. Now in order to be considered a premi and be admitted to the NICU, you must be born less the 38 weeks of gestation (unless you are a kick ass baby at 37 weeks and don't need any help) or you have to be a really sick baby. There are multiple problems that come with being born before 38 weeks..under developed lungs, inability to feed, inability to maintain body temperature...the list goes on. I can't remember how many weeks old the babies I took care of were, but I do know I was in something called the NICU 2...where the little babies take the last step to being discharged. So my babies were not big, but they weren't tiny or really sick...just little and born early. The day was VERY slow. I did a lot of changing diapers and swaddling. I met a DR that knows my father in law! It was crazy...although you have to follow him like a hawk. The nurse and I were so occupied with mom, dad, and grandma over one twin, we did not notice that Dr had left the other twin completely exposed. We went to teach dad how to change the diaper on the exposed twin and he took so long and the baby got so cold he peed on himself. I finally got him diapered and swaddled, but the exposure had gotten to the poor thing and his temperature dropped dramatically, so we couldn't feed him and we had to put him back in the warmer. By the end of the day he was warm enough to feed outside of the warmer. His brother on the other hand was doing fabulously. He ate a ton!!! About a half hour after we put him back to sleep he spit up all over himself...freezing himself!! So I quickly changed all of his stuff and he just would not stop crying so I put on gown and rocked a little 5lb baby for an hour. My "mommy" genes were screaming. I am so ready to have a little one!!! All in all it wasn't a bad day in the NICU. I am sure it would have been a different story had a seen the really tiny and sick babies. Sorry Andre...I still don't want to be a NICU nurse. :)

Day 83: Well this day was just work and Dr CSI's class. I had a presentation to make. Turns out I picked the same article another girl in my class did two weeks ago when I wasn't in class!!! Odd chance of that happening. I presented the article anyway. Not the best presentation I have ever done, but I was caught off guard by the repetitive nature of my report. Then we watch a video of a midwife in Mexico deliver her own baby at home..in water. Slightly disturbing. I am not a fan of the water births...it sort of grosses me out. You are sitting there in your own stuff. Blah!!

Day 84: This day was the day of failure. Of shear confidence breaking madness. Every semester we take a math test. Medication mistakes are a huge part of illness and death in the healthcare setting. Our teachers stress the importance of knowing how to properly calculate medications before we can administer them. I had studied for this test and yet I found out later I failed it by one question. The reason I failed was I didn't pay attention to detail. I flew through the test thinking it would be easy and it was, but my own hubris got the best of me in the details. The next failure was actually the first. We were passing off on giving medications via syringe pump. I was not confident about my math and ask Prof Mom to check it for me. I didn't know that asking her to check my math counted as a failure and just didn't think about it when she gave me a new scenario. We had to draw up the medications in front of her. TWICE I did it wrong (I spilled the medication, the first time and was under the impression from Prof Mom that I had done something wrong with the mechanical process of drawing up the meds.) So I re-drew and she asked me if I was happy with the way I had drawn up the medication. I could not think of what I did wrong, so I said yes, and she said I failed and was now a remediation. If I didn't pass the remediation, I would fail the course and be kicked out of the program. Want to know what I did wrong? She lined up three identical bottles in front of me and told me to draw up the medication all the bottles where labeled the same except look closely: Cefuroxime, Ceftriaxone, Cefotaxime. Now you tell me, if you were a nervous nursing student thinking you are only there to prove you can start a syringe pump, would you even bother to think you would be set up in such a way. And by the way...I was the only person in my class she did that too. I was kicking my self in the butt for my stupidity. I was PISSED!!! She would not let me take it again after class. No I had to go through the whole remediation crap! Which meant I had to come to open lab in my free time and practice...which I did and ended up teaching three other people in the class how to do it. Not only that I did it with the same drugs (although I checked multiple times, with the nurse watching) in the ER that weekend and I did it perfectly!! Needless to say I haven't had a panic attack that bad in a long time. Sorry Honey for exploding on you!!!!! My confidence was truly shaken. It still is in many ways.

Day 85: Lecture. I had to drag myself to class. I did not want to be there. All I wanted to do was test off and figure out what I did wrong on the math test. I was so distracted the whole day. The worst part about it was I had a peds exam that afternoon. The Vet Tech came out of that test (she is the smartest in the class) and said she thought that test was hard...when she thinks a test is hard, its hard. So we all thought we failed. Surprisingly I got an 83. Not bad...I thought.

I will have to continue this blog later today! I must go take my math quiz! TO BE CONTINUED!!!!!