Some help would be nice...

My condolences. Nurses deal with death and dying and it isn't easy.

Moved to OB forum in hopes you receive more replies.

Let me just say I have experienced multiple pregnancy losses and some nurses were amazing in their care of me; others sorely lacked. All you can do is remember how you were made to feel and hope to do better, if you choose to be a nurse one day. And try to remember those who were kind to you and really concentrate on that. Don't discount the idea of counseling if you become too sad or depressed. I needed it myself, and it helped me enormously.

I am so terribly sorry for your loss and the subsequent care that you did not receive. I hope that you are able to find support within your family, friends and community.

I work in a birth center and the losses we deal with are usually those over 20 weeks. We do our best to help families in the few hours that they are with us to start their way through the grieving process.

We offer to contact either our own pastoral services department or a clergy person of the parent's choice. We often have our own pastoral care come in regardless because they are trained in dealing with families going through a stressful time and can provide an ear to listen and a liason between the nurses and the family if we are involved in a resusitation of a baby. It also helps us as nurses to have pastoral care there to help us with some of the feelings we may be dealing with at the time. This is not to try and push our religeon on anyone, but to have an extra person available to the family.

We strongly encourage families to see the babies, touch and hold them - no matter how tiny they are. We take many, many, many pictures. We have disposable 35mm cameras in our "red rose" kit that we give to the families for them to take pictures themselves. We try to get pictures with items included like a teddybear - something that they can take home and look at the picture and hold the blanket or teddybear. It also helps to give a point of reference for the size of the baby.

If the baby is big enough and, I don't know how to put this delicately, but able to be bathed, we offer the family (mom, dad, grandparents, aunts, etc...) the opportunity to participate in this. We also offer them the opportunity to participate in getting foot and hand prints, cutting a lock of hair, dressing the baby, etc... When you stop to think about it, this is the only opportunity they will have to do these things for their baby. We also provide keepsakes such as a two part necklace - one for the parents and one to keep with the baby, a certificate of life to recognize the life that was lost, we send them home clothes that the baby wore (we do not launder these for any reason, these clothes have the 'essence' of the baby whether it is blood from the birth or vernix, it doesn't matter).

We keep the baby with the family as long as they want to have the baby with them. If the family as older siblings, we try to help them explain what happened to the siblings in a way they can understand. If the parents and kids want, we let them hold baby and take plenty of pictures of all of them together.

Sometimes this is such a horrific time for moms that they cannot bring themselves to hold the baby, look at the baby, etc... We do our best to encourage this and support them in their decisions, whatever they are. We will take photographs with our professional camera and the company does a nice bereavement package for families for free - but they send pictures to the hospital and we will forward them to parents if they want them. We keep these pictures forever, we never know when parents will want them.

We provide information on available support groups in the area, feelings that both mom and dad experience after having gone throught this, how loved ones can help, things that they should not say - and I'm sure you know better than I the hurtful things that are said without realizing how painful they are.

One thing we strongly encourage is for parents to name their babies. If the baby is too early to identify the gender, we suggest a gender neutral name like Chirs, Pat, etc..

We have a 'red rose' packette for all fetal losses. The packette contains a red rose that goes on mom's door so that everyone is aware that mom has lost a baby and does not make an unintentional remark. It includes a check list of what we as nurses need to do for both the physical but also emotional health of mom and the family.

I hope this helps answer some of your questions. If you can think of anything that I can do for my patients that you wish someone would have done for you, please let me know. I want to be able to do as much for my families as I possibly can and your input would be greatly appreciated.

Although most people think I have the best job in the world because I get to work with all the babies, they forget that it can be the most tragic part of the hospital.

Please know my thoughts and prayers are with you. I wish you all the best.

Heather

I can sympathize with how you felt. When I was only 19 years old and just recently married I found out that I was pregnate with what I feel in my heart was a baby boy. At just 14 weeks along I had a miscarriage that was devistating. The worst part of this was when a ob resident came into my room becouse the nurse could not find a heart beat. This cocky resident said if I cant find one it means the babys dead. After listening for a few minutes he laid down the doppler said "Yeah your babys dead!" and walked out of the room. You can imagine my reaction being there all alone becouse none of my family had made it to the hospital yet. This was also the begining of the end to my short lived marriage. My husband at the time could not handle my depression and could not understand why I cried for months on end and left never to come back. This was a terrible time in my life and even to this day every January 13th is a hard day for me. Thankfully my new husband will sympathize with me on that day and understands my sadness.

heather- it sounds like your unit does an exceptional job at caring for these mothers! kudos to you and yours! love the teddy bear reference as well!

quick ? though- do the moms who lost a baby room in one area of the unit? i would imagine the sounds of babies crying would really upset them.

We really do try to do our best for our families. We give patients the option of staying in the birth center or going out to the m/s floor. The advantages of being in the birth center is that they will be guaranteed a private room - I don't care how busy we are!!! That is a goal out on m/s, but can't always be guaranteed. We are also a smaller unit, so we really get to spoil our patients. If they go out to m/s and were full-term then a BC nurse still has to go out and do fundal checks as most of our m/s nurses aren't comfortable checking a fundal height.

Physically, the unit is set up as two halls down a corridor with a center column of showeres, nurses desks, locker rooms, etc... One side has five rooms that we use for post-partum. The other side has two LDR rooms, one multipurpose room - we make it do what we want/need (LDR, PP, mag, observation, triage, etc) and two rooms that we use as last resort pp rooms. Those two rooms are usually used for the occ. post-op gyne, antepartum (Mag, etc) - but also our losses. We use our judgement to keep them away from the main traffic of the unit and away from crying babies and laboring/delivering moms.

This is one of the toughest parts of my job, but I find it the most rewarding.