Rough day in the NICU.

I'm up in the NICU as a unit coord now (instead of just in the ER) and in nursing school and after Dec. I can start PCA'ing up in the NICU too...Yay!

Anyway, we had a rough day in the NICU on Friday.

35w baby with "birth asphyxia". Mom had felt babe stop moving on a Sun, didn't get it checked out until Monday, immediate delivery, but too late to really save the child in a meaningful way.

Sweet little boy was brain dead. They'd had many EEGs, each progressively worse. The parents finally decided to d/c life support. It was terrible because you could tell how much they loved that little baby and how much it hurt them to make that decision.

The hard part was they were getting an avalanche of phone calls - mostly from Dad's Dad and grandpa's pastor. Grandpa was screaming and swearing and threatening cops and lawsuits because we were "killing his grandson". Apparently, a few days prior, a finger had twitched on the child that the grandpa had witnessed, and he decided that meant the child would make a full recovery This pastor was also saying nasty things to the parents (or rather, had in the past, we weren't allowing her calls to go through)

It was just a sad situation all around. They removed the vent around 330, and by the time I left at 730, the baby was still alive Just agonal breaths but a relatively strong HR. But I'm sure it made it that much worse for the parents. The baby's sats were in the 30s, but the heart rate wasn't going down.

I just had to get this out here. I felt so bad for the parents to have had to make that choice and deal with that. What a nightmare.