[8great]

Good luck! Hope you have some solid way of taking care of yourself. These are all great stories, soon you'll have your own. I worked in the OKC bombing, in the PICU...............as much as that was in the news, it might have seemed easy to forget that those kind of patients/ miracles/heart breaks happen everyday in the PICU. It's an amazing place to be.

[AliRae]

I have another one to add!

Over the summer, while we were on strike, a kid came in following a horrific MVA. Thankfully the only really sick kid that needed to be admitted while we were out, and there were enough HNs to take care of him properly until we came back. He was a train wreck. Quickly got trached, vent dependent and we pretty much wrote him off. He went to a rehab hospital where they actually weaned him to trach collar. Unfortunately, he went into respiratory arrest there, coded, and came back. What little he had been able to do was totally gone. We stabilized him, dealt with some pressing issues and sent him to another rehab hospital, where we figured he would stay for a l o n g time.

Just the other day, he wheeled his motorized chair onto the unit, followed by his beaming mother. His smile was enormous as he explained to us that he didn't remember any of us, but he wanted to thank us for saving his life. That's right- he's awake, smiling, decannulated and talking, walking with parallel bars and they have hopes that he still might make it out of the chair some day. We paged everyone we could think of, and the hall was packed with people coming to see him and hug his mother. Not a dry eye in the place, and none of us could stop smiling for the rest of the day.


Goes to show ... you really have to give those TBIs their full year before you start thinking they're not going to get better!

[medic2ernurse2b]

I'd like to tell a story of my own. I'm not a nurse (yet) but I'm a paramedic and I have some very basic knowledge of critical care. (Not so much peds, though.) When my daughter was 7 weeks old she went into septic shock. She was born at 34 weeks gestation, so she was really only a one week old full term. She was admitted to the PICU in the early afternoon and intubated. Towards evening, her HR and O2 sat would decrease when she was being touched or handled. A couple hours, later, her BP dropped, and I heard the Dr (who was a fellow at that time) order dopamine. That's when it really sunk in and I exclaimed "Oh my God, she's going to die!" The look on the nurse's face was priceless. She didn't say anything but looked like she wanted to say "I don't know what to tell you 'cuz you're probably right." In the very early morning hours she stabilized, but ended up with an embolus from the central line, which had to be surgically removed later that day. Nearly 48 hours later, she was extubated, but took a couple of steps back and was intubated again. A day later they tried again with success. She was then sent to the med surg floor and was hospitalized for 14 days. They wanted her to have a 14 day course of IV antibiotics because of the severity of her condition. All she had left were scalp veins, the were unable to locate venous access for a PICC line. 13 months later, we took her to the hospital out patient for a vascular follow up. I went to the PICU and saw one of the nurses AND the Dr. He was soooo happy to see her and to know that she was fine. And I'm glad I saw him when I did because his fellowship was ending in a couple of weeks and he found an attending position at a hospital an hour away.

Kellie, you are so right when you tell others not to judge, especially by how often or not so often the parent(s) visit. When my daughter was transferred to the med/surg unit, the nurse asked if I could stay (basically at all hours) with my daughter. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't always be there because I had to take care of her twin brother, and only one visitor was allowed overnight. My husband had just returned to work from a 4 week FMLA, and our parents don't live nearby. When I stated I couldn't, she didn't say anything but gave somewhat of a disapproving look.

To all of you PICU nurses out here, I have the utmost respect for you all...I could work critical care, but not peds or neonates. I'm not ashamed to admit they scare me. They're definitely an entity of their own, and they're smarter than we think. They have built in s*** detectors!