What a feeling!!

NICU_Nurse, BSN, RN · Aug 20, 2003

Cindy, what a beautiful post! I'm with YOU!

I freely admit that baby hair is my weakness- there is nothing softer or silkier than the hair of an infant, and if I had my way, I'd have rubbed all my babies bald by now! I can't get enough of it.

There's just something about a baby snuggling into you when you hold them to your chest...the way the snuggle into your chest and find that- no, not there- no...not quite...THERE! That place! and then just sigh and fall right to sleep. I have been known to drag out those moments until the last possible second (when I have to get up and do something RIGHT AWAY) because I just know that with all of the noise and excitement in the nursery all the time, it's probably the first time they've felt secure and safe and actually gotten good sleep all day/night.

I think I'm just a sucker for hair of any kind- don't you just love those babies covered in lanugo? Oh, my, words don't explain how soft they are! I love other people's hairy little babies! I admit it! I'm an addict.

cswain12000 · Aug 20, 2003

NICU_Nurse: yes--I'm an addict too--but what a wonderful addiction to have. the feelings just sometimes really overwhelm me and I get carried away--it's better than Calgon! Cindy

dawngloves, BSN, RN · Aug 20, 2003

Love to cuddle! Love, love love it!!!!!! You look at that little person and think about how miserable they were on CPAP and when you had to stick them a dozen times because they needed a new line for transfusions and now they are going home tomorrow!!! Love it!

neonatalRN · Aug 20, 2003

awww, that is so sweet!

Heidi

pappyRN · Aug 20, 2003

Good Morning,

Words can't begin to describe how much I miss working as an NICU nurse. You describe those feelings deep inside that we all have felt at least a gazillion times and each time is as special as the time before.

I had to give up my beloved job about one year after being pulled to the PICU transitional unit and getting injured lifting a large toddler on steroids! As a matter of fact, he was one of our graduates and he had been my primary.He was just adorable although the little guy was still saddled with a trach and a vent at 19 months old. Things certainly do come full circle.

But...it was not meant to be for me to stay in my beloved NICU where for me, the joy of nursing had been rekindled with a fire like no other I had experienced in nursing.The only exception was my capping ceremony-that was when I realized that I WAS going to reach what I had dreamed of since I was just a little girl. So, after working in a peds division of a small community hospital where not only did we care for peds pts but all overflow pts when the house was full, NICU felt like dying and going to heaven! If there was a patient that they didn't quite know what to do with but who didn't need intensive care... he also came to peds. It was ludicrous. Adults would be admitted to the second bed in rooms with a pediatric patient. It was no wonder that we felt that we had become the hospital dumping ground. It was also a very strange and risky situation I might add to put an unknown adult in the same room with a child. The Moms who stayed felt very uneasy with an adult male being in the room with her infant especially because when she was going to be spending the night.

I developed reflex sympathetic dystrophy as a result of my injury and underwent a two level cervical discectomy, two shoulder decompressions and acromioplasty, and a thoracic outlet decompression with brachial neurolysis, minimus, anterior, and middle scalenectomies along with a surgical sympathectomy that caused extemely severe unrelenting burning pain to become several times worse. After numerous nerve blocks and procedures I haven't shown any progress and it has now been eight years since my injury. I have suffered a moderate amount of atrophy to my shoulder, arm and hand. There isn't enough fine motor coordination in my fingers and hand to be able to do things like write or start an IV because I also have severe tingling with numbness in all the fingertips of my right hand, my dominant hand.

Finally, I accept that it is no longer meant to be that I can return to NICU nursing. I have also developed fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue immune syndrome. The combination of all these diseases, the amount of pain medication I must take just to get through 2-3 hours intervals causes overwhelming fatigue and has initiated numerous cognitive problems that has also made it impossible to even consider returning to ANY form of nursing. I can't remember what the heck I am doing from one minute to the next. I always forget what I am saying. Can you see me teaching some poor premie's teenaged Mom like this?LOL

It just brought back beautiful special memories and I could imagine exactly the situation you described. Sorry for barging in like this but I just wanted to experience it one last time even if only as a beautiful memory. Keep doing what you do. Be glad that you work in NICU. Having been a patient numerous times, I can't imagine taking care of adults. Yuck!

My personal fetish about babies was also their hair and skin. We used Baby Magic on the bigger kids and term newborns and I loved that clean smell so much I used it on my legs after shaving them. Whenever I needed a moisturizer- OUT came the Baby Magic!

But...the new personal favorite came to me in a most wonderful way. I became a grandmother for the first time 16 glorious months ago. My grandson is my absolute joy and the love of my life. I never knew you could love someone more than your children and if not more equally. What a difference he has made in my life. I have struggled with severe depression over the loss of my profession and the pain that I must live with daily-some which was inflicted by careless physicians. So, to have wonderful happy experiences is just the best. BUT NOW...the new fragrance to replace the Baby Magic which I thought that I'd NEVER give up...is Johnson & Johnson's Bedtime Lotion with Lavender and Chamomile. It is really cool and it smells so clean without making you smell like a baby's hiney! Try it, I'm sure you'll be sold. I hated it when they made us stop using Baby Magic on the itty bitty little guys and switched them to safflower oil. I know it was better for their skin- BELIEVE me I know it is better- it was a teaching hospital and we conducted skin care research for premies but I just wish it had even a fraction of that clean wonderful baby lotion smell. I do have to admit that I used to love to just smell their hair and their baby smell without the lotion also.

Thanks for allowing me a walk down memory lane. You are so fortunate to be able to care for these precious little beings.

Warm personal regards,

PappyRN

Tiki_Torch · Aug 21, 2003

Awwwww!!! (((((((Pappy))))))) :scrying:

What a wonderful nurse you were!!! It's a complete blessing to have your memories to comfort you, isn't it? Your post reminded me just how important it is to thoroughly enjoy each day because we truly don't know when it will all end.

Thank you for sharing your story, and I hope you don't mind if I send up some prayers for comfort and peace for you.

NICU_Nurse, BSN, RN · Aug 21, 2003

((((((((((((((((((((Pappy))))))))))))))))))))))

I'm so sorry that you've had to leave your career and gone through so much suffering with your injuries, but now you have time to spend with your grandson and fmily, hopefully, and whether you're still working as a nurse or not just know that you've touched lives that are changed because of things you did, and that does not lose value over time, despite our circumstances. Thank you for sharing your story with us!

PS. Have you tried the Aveeno Vanilla and Lavendar lotion? It's TO DIE FOR. I use it on myself every day, it smells so good!

pappyRN · Aug 21, 2003

Thank you to all of you.

I definitely need and will gladly take any prayers you can spare. I NEVER thought that I would look and feel this old before I actually became that old!. Just about everything that can go wrong- HAS gone wrong with me. I am one of those patients who develops each and every known rare side effect or complication that doctors explain and say will virtually NEVER happen to you!

I really do miss working in NICU a lot. I have tried to get myself to a place of inner peace because the struggle and the grieving over losing something I loved so much was consuming me. With my diseases, especially RSD, TOS, fibro/CFIDS... stress can bring on one heck of an exacerbation. I become my own worst enemy.

Due to the medications I must take and cognitive problems that are inherent with any one and/or all of these afflictions, I can't think straight a lot. I try to think of what I am going to say in advance but it's not very helpful. I can look at an object and for the life of me, I can NOT figure out what it is called, even though I know it is something I am familiar with. My short term memory just got up and left. It's so hard remembering what someone has said or did or what I did even if it was just minutes or a few hours ago. That is just too scary for me. I don't think it would be safe for me to care for anyone in that condition but especially not neonates. I am unable to lift more than 2 lbs with my rt arm-my dominant side. The numbness and loss of fine motor dexterity renders me incapable of being able to have the precision required for tasks like drawing blood, starting IVs or taping tubing within a small area etc. I can't imagine what a kid's ostomy bag would look like with me trying to cut the right sized hole and location in a tegaderm wafer to apply the bag!

I do think I could help feed but my former head nurse said there would be liability issues because of my lifting restrictions and she's afraid I will drop a baby. That is highly unlikely to happen, but I understand her concerns to an extent. I had volunteered to help her like that in times of high acuity but nrsg admin says no. I assured them that I would NEVER do anything that would put a babe at risk and that includes lifting them if they were too big for me to handle. It's probably better in the long run because I am sure that it would just have made me miss my job even more than I already do. This would have been my 29th year of practice in nursing.

I was just so unbelievably proud that I was the ONLY person in my family that went on to school after high school and reached my dream. I could NOT have been more proud to be and say that I was a nurse. I read every Cherry Ames book at least four times while growing up dreaming of becoming a nurse. I remember my family doctor's nurse from when I was five years old. Her name was Delores and she was the sweetest person. I hated the doctor and was terrified of him but I knew that Delores would save me from any evil that might befall me! My sister was on the fast track of advancement in her career with the airline industry but she fell down the steps and she now has severe fibromyalgia and has never been the same since her accident. My oldest sister has severe degenerative joint and disc disease througout her spine and has had three surgeries. She is said to have 'failed back syndrome'. Three out of three daughters in this family are all seeing pain management specialists for degenerative, inflammatory, chronic pain causing syndromes and diseases. All started from an injury. We have also had difficulty with being diagnosed. My oldest sister was walking around with a failed fusion and pars defect in her lumbar spine at two levels. My middle sister has severe sciatica but no cause can be determined. I was misdiagnosed numerous times and lost my window of opportunity for treatment and remission. I wonder what it is with us that we never seem to develop anything 'normal' when we get ill or get injured? In otherwords- we're weird!

To this day I remain very proud of many of my accomplishments in the NICU/Special Care Nursery. I loved working the Special Care Nursery because working with the parents and families and teaching them what they needed to know to bring a babe home was really my niche. On the technical side, my niche was IV starts. For whatever reason, people asked me to start their IVs. I just had a knack for it, I guess. A lot of nurses cringed when they had to take the babes of teenaged Moms. I just loved that age group. My children are all very close in age. The year I got injured they were 11, 13, 15, and 17 so it was right up my alley to deal with teenagers- especially the difficult ones. For whatever reason, the young, single nurses were the most hesitant to be assigned to the babes of these young Moms. On occasion, we'd have to intervene with a Mom forgetting where she was and making out with her boyfriend OR the babe's Dad, whatever the case may have been. I'd just let them know it was inappropriate and tell them " OK. Knock it off!"

I think having an easy rapport with young Mom's came somewhat naturally from having my own kids who were of their same age group. I was around kids whether at work or at home.

I found it equally beneficial when making teaching aids for them, to make them WITH THEM. It was our practice to make posters or signs for the purpose of helping them to remember the babe's routine, treatments, and medications etc. This situation almost always produced a better outcome if I engaged the Mom in helping me with making them. It reinforced what they needed to do or remember and it gave them a stake in their babe's well being as well as pride and ownership of having to remember whatever task or thing we were trying to emphasize. I met many very talented young ladies and that also provided a common ground for establishing trust and rapport. Art can be a very therapeutic and easy way to breakthrough natural barriers due to age or other factors. The goal of this learning exercise would be impeded if you were not able to get their interest and attention and would therefore defeat the purpose of the entire attempt! It was and is my belief that a young teenaged Mom of a babe with special needs would be more apt to be compliant and attentive with those needs if she had a hand in making these visual aids meant to make her job easier. Many put their special decorating touches on these posters to hang on the babe's wall either at home or while still in the hospital. I went out and bought a whole bunch of markers, crayons, colored pencils and poster board and kept it all in my locker so it didn't grow feet and walk away never to be seen again! No job would be complete without the whiners and naysayers who complained that having the Moms help with making their babe's visual aids was too time consuming or too "this" or too "that" etc. Of course it would be faster to do it yourself but YOU weren't the one who needed to learn the information being taught! So, what was the point of being faster? I didn't want to teach her to be faster, I wanted to teach her how to do it right and to give her babe the best care that she was able to. Our hospital served a very large indigent population and they weren't likely to spend what little money they did have on markers and poster boards if they had to make a choice between that or food! Besides, it gave me a captive audience if we did these things together. We could both have fun while one learned and one taught! The discussion came a lot more easily. Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. I got caught up in my memories. The memories are all I have of my accomplishments now.

I haven't tried Aveeno Vanilla and Lavender. I generally do not care for the vanilla scent, only the taste! LOL But, I will give it a try. I might find that I am surprised and like it.

Well, sorry I went on and on. I don't ever seem to be able to post anything-anywhere without having the written a novel! But, that's just me. To know me is to love me!

Thanks for making me feel I am still a part of the NICU nurses group.

Warm personal regards,

PappyRN

Tiki_Torch · Aug 21, 2003

Oh Pappy,

Please do consider yourself a part of our NICU group!!!

You may not be working in a NICU now, but your years and years of dedicated experience can be incredibly helpful to us when you share stories and tips with us here. That is just one way you would be able to continue contributing to the NICU nursing profession... kind of as an online mentor for us.

I know there are many nurses who join these boards who are not presently working and many of them have even retired too, but just because a nurse is not actively working doesn't mean they don't have plenty to contribute! Knowledge truly is power, and the more knowledge we have (and use) means we can affect good change in this World of ours... and isn't that one of the main things that life is all about in the end?

I personally am a NICU nurse who hasn't worked for just over 3 years myself. I just met up with a NICU nurse manager who is looking for a new employee and so I may be getting back to the bedside before I know it. I took time off to take care of ill and dying family members, but found solace and comraderie here on these boards. I have felt "strange" about contributing to threads because of my unemployed status, but now I'm seeing the light better... experience is invaluable and when it's shared to assist others, it becomes completely priceless! So, please keep sharing here with us! We need nurses like you!!!

Sending cyberhugs and prayers your way!

Mira · Aug 23, 2003

I love hearing true-to-life stories,I love the wisdom I can earn and share as much.

I am addicted to the smell of this babies,I think there is a chemical that produces a calming effect to those who care for them.:)

Bre · Aug 26, 2003

I am hoping to be part of a NICU in the Twin Cities, MN and just loved reading about your love for your job! I have been a MCH float and loved the NICU the most. My decision to go into nursing school happened after my personal experience with the NICU in St. Paul. The nurses were amazing and Iwas so touched by there caring and level of expertise. So right after maternity time off I registered for nursing school! Here I am about to (hopefully) work where it all began for me. It would be such an honor! Thanks for you thoughts about your career! I can't wait to share those same joys!