iNO Babies and Pregnancy

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Hey everyone!

I'm a new nurse, and I've been working NICU for 8 months. I'm newly pregnant and I remember reading on here a while back that pregnant women shouldn't take care of patients on iNO. Can you give me more info on this? I've never heard anyone mention this at my job, and I want to be informed in case someone tries to assign me an iNO patient.

Also, should I try and stay a safe distance from a patient on iNO, even if I'm not caring for the baby? If so, what is a safe distance?

Unfortunately, some of the more seasoned nurses that I work with are a bit cynical of pregnant nurses not wanting to do certain things (holding for x-rays for instance).

I don't want to do anything that will possibly harm my baby.

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Specializes in Maternal - Child Health.

Congratulations!

Please talk to your OB/midwife and ask for guidelines on occupational health issues and pregnancy.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, educator.

http://https://allnurses.com/forums/f33/nitric-headache-245331.html#post2374873

Here is a link to one of the discussions. It is policy in our unit for pregnant docs and nurses to not be in the room with nitric. I have a link in my post that we refer to.

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Specializes in Neonatal ICU (Cardiothoracic).

That's too bad that your coworkers react that way to you not wanting to be near during xrays. I mean, come on! Unprotected xray exposure is known to cause problems. As if any of them wouldn't care if it were their baby. Unfortunately, I HAVE seen my share of pregnant coworkers refuse to take a perfectly safe and doable assignment with the excuse that they are pregnant. (Also another older discussion on this forum)

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Specializes in Adult Med Surg and NICU.

i'm a pregnant NICU nurse too. My unit is huge, and my supervisors are pretty cool most of the time about stuff.

Never heard about the INO stuff. Interesting.

I have however, had a supervisor try to get me to take care of a baby with a raging CMV infection. I was persistent and they changed my assignment.

I don't hold during xrays, I just stick my head out in the hallway and hunt someone to come stand there and do it for me. Sometimes the xray tech has to wait a minute for me to find someone but oh well. Worse case scenario, I have been told that for those baby xrays, the radiation is such a small dose Im not getting any at all like a foot away from the baby.

I absolutely refuse to take care of CMV babies and Listeria infection babies. If you contract Listeria when pregnant, you have a high neonatal sepsis chance with a 60% chance of fetal death.

My supervisors usually don't ever assign pregnant nurses contact patients because they are worried about us getting too hot in the gowns.

i know I am pretty lucky to work in a great unit and out of all 9 or 10 of our supervisors only one has been kind of a pain about the CMV patients.

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