Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Life in the RCNIC




If you have never been a RCNIC you might envision a Serene place for little ones to sleep and get better. Or possibly you might think of a room where you hear the buzz of medical equipment. While both of these are true the things you might be missing is the beeping of medicine pumps when they are close to running out of medicine, or a sensor misreading and making the desat alarm go off , you will also hear the chatter of the nursing staff. You hear all of these things on a daily basis and they all are not really alarming. But there are days in the RCNIC that can be extremely stressful even when your child is doing very well. Today seemed to be one of those days. The day started off really serene and comfortable in fact, I got to hold Sophia for over two hours and she was extremely comfortable and happy. We left for a while and came back for rounds. when we walked to her Pod's doors (big room where her bed is) we could see that the doctors were rounding on another CDH baby so we waited until we were flagged in. We got to hear how well she was doing and could also see that the doctors were about to do a sterile procedure on another baby in Sophia's pod (we are not allowed to stay when sterile procedures are being done in the pod). We congratulated Sophie on another good report and headed out. We visited with Sophia before dinner and also headed back to say our good nights. While in the pod we over heard that a motor was not running right on a very important piece of medical equipment for another baby and they had to switch the motor out. This was not a sterile procedure so we got to stay in the pod and we kept Sophia as calm as we could during the commotion. All of the commotion was behind a curtain, but if I had a knife I could have cut the air in the pod due to the high level of stress that was in that room. Lets just say it was some of the longest 8 minutes that we have had while visiting Sophia in the RCNIC. Patrick and I kept trying to have a Wizard of Oz moments saying to ourselves "pay no attention to whats going on being the curtain" but when it is literally over your shoulder it is hard to not hear it. The motor change they did on the other patient went fine and the stress levels receded.
Hearing all of this was stressful for Patrick and I, because we met the mom before either of our babies were born, we also know how important the piece of medical equipment was and also because we both had a small fear of hearing the baby have a problem and having the major alarm go off and seeing all of the nurses run in, Thank God that did not happen for several reasons.
It truly is amazing how these men and women work in this environment everyday, I had a lot of respect for nurses in the past but nothing compared to the admiration I have for them now. I also have to comment on how blessed we are again that we were referred here so our little Sophia can receive this exceptional care.

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