Working Weekend

I love my job . . . I love my job . . .I love my job . . .

This has been my mantra the past 3 days as we trudged through another weekend with a new group of residents. Already, this group seems better than the last - THANK GOD!!!! Like most jobs, we have our good days, and we have our bad days. I'll start at the beginning:

Friday morning, I arrived to a seemingly normal group of babies only to find that one of them likes to hold her breath until all the alarms start ringing and I am poking/flicking/"encouraging her to breathe in various ways", one is a 4 month old (really, a term kid that's been in our unit 4 months and wants to play), and one that's supposed to go home to a Spanish speaking only, first time mother who has had NO discharge teaching. Well, needless to say, the 4 month old didn't get to play that day! My only saving grace, so I thought, was that I'd have one less on Saturday...

Saturday morning, I come in to find that my little girl who didn't like to breathe was now holding her breath so long that her heart rate was plummeting. Great. I started out the day telling the doctors that she wasn't acting right and needed help breathing. Fast forward to the END of my shift (6:15 PM) after several reminders that she's acting out: I check my orders, and all of a sudden there are all these STAT orders on her. WHY COULDN'T THEY HAVE DONE THAT WHEN I ASKED THAT MORNING?!?!?!? Anyway, we got it done and I got out of there before 8. YEA!!

Then came this morning . . . By 7:15 AM, we'd started coding the poor little boy next to my "breath-holding-girl". Thankfully, she was on the ventilator by this point, so her breath-holding was taken care of mechanically (as opposed to being taken care of by her nurse). :-) The little boy finally got on the road around 10AM to a hospital with the heart/lung bypass machine, (please pray for this sick, little boy who was born Friday afternoon!!) and the rest of the day was a little more calm. My shift ended with me telling my favorite little girl in the unit, "Lexi", goodbye. She's headed to Boston tomorrow for some special testing/surgeries to try and help her digest. Like my precious "Sam" back in Texas, she cannot handle any food. Please pray for her and her sweet parents as they start this new chapter in their lives!

All this griping is to say that it's been a frustrating weekend, and I'm SO VERY GRATEFUL for a "day of rest" tomorrow! Most days I absolutely LOVE my job and miss it when I'm away from it for a while. But, days like this past weekend make me really look forward to time away from the unit. :)