Overcoming Pediatric Fears

[greenapplern]

Hi All,

I am currently in nursing school, and I have a love for pediatrics. I completed internships in college throughout the hospital, and really enjoyed pediatrics. The concern that remains though is, how are you able to deal with pediatric deaths, traumas, etc. I have never seen any dramatic injuries/deaths in the wing while I was there, and I just wanted to know how you get through these traumatic times, and if it inevitably takes a toll on you mentally.

I would love to work in the department some day, but I am concerned about this. Thoughts?

[NotReady4PrimeTime, RN]

You could start by reading the other threads that have been started on this topic...

https://allnurses.com/picu-nursing-pediatric/how-survive-picu-283909.html

https://allnurses.com/picu-nursing-pediatric/picu-fear-200547.html

https://allnurses.com/pediatric-nursing/pediatric-advice-please-562507.html

Most children who die do it in the ICU. The ones who would pass away on the peds floor are ones with metabolic, neuromuscular or cancer-related disorders, and their deaths are generally expected. Trauma patients are stabilized in the ICU and are well on the mend when they go out to the general peds population. The threads listed above have some very insightful posts that should give you an idea of how most of us cope.

[hiddencatRN, BSN, RN]

I work in a peds ED and serious injury is much more common than death, and both are still pretty rare. I'm still new but the one thing I've learned is to be very selective about who I share difficult experiences with. Not in a HIPAA sense but because other people really don't want to hear about bad things happening to children. So when I need to talk about a difficult experience, I find someone in healthcare who has similar exposure to talk to, and when family members ask me about the "craziest" thing I've seen, I lie or redirect and tell them that really what I see is a lot of fevers and asthma.

I think it also helps to come to some sort of understanding with death. In school we had to write a letter to death and while it was a corny assignment, it was a good exercise in thinking about what death means to me and getting it all down on paper.