I have a question??!! puh-leez

Gompers, BSN, RN · Nov 23, 2003

Nursing in general is not for everybody, and working with children isn't for every nurse either! There are highs and lows everywhere in medicine, but they seem to be especially intense in the NICU. The highs are seeing kids beat the odds, get bigger, and go home. I'd say, in my level III unit, this happens about 90% of the time. The other 10% you have to deal with...it can be devastating. Patients die all over the hospital, but when you're dealing with babies, you're not only caring for them, you're also caring for their familes. You have to be good with people, very caring, very compassionate. You have to be sure that you want to do this, otherwise it's very easy to get burned out.

When babies are sick, you have to do things to them that aren't always nice and that are sometimes painful. You need to stick them with needles to draw blood, put in IVs, etc. You have to put in catheters and feeding tubes. You have to change their dressings and suction their noses, mouths, and lungs. You sometimes make them cry and see them in pain. It's hard to handle all this with tiny little babies, especially if their parents are watching you! But it has to be done, and you have to be able to tough it out and know that you're trying to help them in the end. You sometimes are busy your whole shift pushing countless medications and blood products into them. You might be taking care of a baby that is on full life support, barely hanging on, paralysed from medications, not even looking like a baby anymore because of swelling - it's very very hard to look at sometimes, but you have to be able to look past all the tubes and sickness and see the child under it all, and you have to devote yourself to doing your best to help that child!

Even with that 90% that do make it out of the NICU, you have to realize that they're not all going to be perfect. Some will be just fine, of course. But others will end up having a lot of other problems, and sometimes it's really hard on you emotionally to break your back caring for a baby who is suffering, that you know is never going to have a normal life. There is a lot of ethical controversy in the NICU. You have to respect the babies, you have to respect their families, you have to respect the medical team, and you have to respect nature.

And you always have to have hope!!!