NICU Rotation

I just completed a rotation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  I've always loved working with babies, but the NICU is a little different.  These babies are so little and fragile that I was a bit intimidated by them.  I didn't want to do anything that could hurt them.  I realized that they maybe little and fragile, but they are not as fragile as I thought.  These little babies would extubate themselves, kick and hit nurses and doctors when they didn't like what was being done to them and they had little personalities, even if they were born at 24-28 weeks gestation.

There were several sets of twins in the NICU during my rotation.  There was a set of twins there were identical and feisty.  These little boys were always up to trouble and I started referring to them as the triple Bs: Badly Behaving Babies!  I had my nickname for them, but the resident had another saying to describe them: Monkey see, Monkey do.  If one decided to wiggle and pull out his intubation on Monday, the other decided to to it later in the day or Tuesday.  They also liked to removed IV and PICC lines via wiggling.  Even though these boys were born at 26 weeks gestation, I suspect that there poor Mamma felt a lot of kicks in her short (far too short) pregnancy.

There was another little guy born around 27 weeks gestation.  This little guy was something else.  He just didn't want to be intubated, or have extra support and he did just fine without it.  I was amazed by him.  So many of the other babies had so many problems, but this little guy only needed minimal support.  I loved watching him grow and see him doing so well.  He was too little to take all of his calories in orally (and was too little to suckle on a bottle so he had to be fed by an oral-gastric tube when he ate orally and the rest of his calories were taken in via is IV) and he needed a little oxygen (he had nasal cannula), but otherwise he was just feeding and growing.  It was exciting to see a little guy do so well.

We also lost a baby during my month in the NICU.  I was at this child's birth and it was such a sad event, unlike the other births I have attended.  Mom and Dad knew that he was coming months too soon, but the doctors couldn't stop the baby from coming any longer (they delayed it a week already and there is only so much you can do to delay the delivery).  The little guy only lasted a couple days.  On one hand, I think he was too little and it may have been a blessing in disguise that he passed away; however, I would never want a parent to have his/her child die.  I wish there was something that I could have done to help the family more.    I kept thinking about what the neonatologist said to the family before the baby was born, "We can just hope for the best, but sometime the best thing isn't the thing that we hoped for."

I learned so much during my time in the NICU and  enjoyed the rotation, but I don't think that I want to do NICU as a specialty.  I think I still want to be a pediatric hematologist and oncologist.  I guess like the parents of the baby that passed away I can only hope for the best.