The best way to describe life at a NICU is like life at a University, except more fragile and sterile. You have to prepare for class and get ready. You have to be focused, study and understand or you’ll be eaten up by alarms and fear. You learn your professors, financial aide, administration, class officers, president. You pass tests every day, are nervous to do something wrong, and are at the will of the professors. You learn the different teaching styles. You are at the University because you are striving for a higher purpose, a degree that will land you a career.
So life at our University, San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH), you prepare with the following. You tie your hair up, put your purse or belongings in your locker. You take your scrub package. Clean out underneath your nails. Scrub with the brush and soap for 3 minutes. Rinse. The water is always too hot or always too cold. Poor maintenance guy that I saw a few times. Could never keep everyone happy. So then you put on your “gown”. You walk and find YOUR baby. Of course, Parker moved spots several times where as others may have always been moving closer to the door. Parker went from the Pit, to the Barn, the Farm, back to the Garden. They are levels of care and Parker kept misbehaving and needing more attention. That’s ok, we are used to that. Depending on the nurse, you can just jump in if it’s assessment time. Take her temp, change her diaper. Get excited for pee pees and poo poos, always leave the diaper out for the nurse to weigh. It was always hard waiting for the OK when we just wanted to get our hands on our baby. It was even harder when they wouldn’t let us play with her when she was awake after feeds. Due to always having to be stimulated when she was having a desat that was turning into apnea, it didn’t allow for the strongest sleep patterns. But you be patient and learn to wait, because after all, it’s your baby.
You have so many people to learn. You have a social worker, a case manager, Occupational Therapist (OT), two neonatologists, one being the chief, a nurse manager, a director, several respiratory therapists- only one per shift- but you have to learn them like the nurses, and of course the most important part, the “mini doctors” as I have referred to friends and family- the nurses, for day and night shift. There is about 60 NICU nurses at SACH, and Parker has been seen by a little over 30 of them. You have to learn each of their style, who is good at explaining, who is good at communicating, who is good at empathizing, who is extremely smart, who is observant, who is good at letting you be “mom” and who follows invisible lines on the book.
You learn what your studying quickly. Parker has “leeds”- 3 little heart stickers with thin wires coming down and hooked into the machine that show her heart rate, saturation level, and respiratory level. Then she has a pulse ox monitor that shows her saturation level and pulse too. You know you don’t want to see her sats dropping because then some part of her body is not getting oxygen in her blood. You learn you don’t want to see residuals when she has feeds – milk that is pulled back out of her NG tube (the thin tube in her nose or mouth that goes to her stomach), unless of course it is partially digested. You definitely don’t want to see green, but clear is good. You learn where the blankets are, but depending on the nurse, you can go get your own burp rag or fresh blanket.
You learn you have to wait until it’s your assessment time. Unless you want to just be staring at your little one so your voice doesn’t stimulate her and wake her up. Preemies need their sleep. They need it to grow and to heal. Their assessment times are every 3 hours. Once they are awake, then you can hold them unless of course they are intubated. Which happened to Parker twice at SACH.
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