When others ask what you do...

Specialties Pediatric

Published

I have been a pediatric nurse for 5 years. I started in a pediatric hospital doing inpatient neurology/neurosurgery and I currently do home health intermittent visits, primarily for patients with cancer. I've been doing it for so long that I barely remember that it's not normal for kids to have cancer or for them to be G-tube dependent, etc. I've had a few situations this year where I've been asked about my job and then when I describe the patients that I care for (many of whom die or are permanently neurologically devastated), the other person is completely dumbfounded and has this look of horror on their face. Like today, for example, I was out with this guy who was asking me about my patients and I started talking about this little baby (1 month old) who developed hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy after prolonged shoulder dystocia and was without a heart beat for the 1st 18 minutes of her life. I was seeing for G/J tube teaching. This is apparently terrifying to your average person. I think I am completely jaded. Anyone else?

This past week has been very, very hard for me. A primary patient of mine passed away very suddenly, from a cause no one saw coming. He had been on our unit 2 months but that was short considering the prior 16 months he had spent in three other hospitals. Never once making it home. This was the hospital he was supposed to go home from. On the same day that he died it was the 2nd birthday of my last primary patient who had died (as a baby, it took a long time for me to agree to being a primary again). Emotionally it has been an exhausting week. Couple that with the extreme acuity and high stress of my unit at the moment (daily ECMO cannulations, codes, open heart OR's etc) and we are all exhausted.

Last night I received a text message though from the mother of my previous primary, the one who would have been two this week. She is having another baby. Hearing that made this week better for me. Knowing that this family, who went through so much and suffered so much, has finally gotten to a place where they can have another child makes me happy, and gives me hope for the family of the little boy I laid in the morgue on Wednesday, that one day they too will be able to heal.

Sometimes this job s*cks! And it's hard and emotionally draining. But I wouldn't work anywhere else.

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