Baby World

Today in baby world, we had to defend a little baby along with her momma to the doctors in charge of her care. The way things go, the doctors don't work as closely as the nurse with the little patients and their families.  They don't develop the attachment...their focus is to cure the disease-who cares about the whole person.  It's frustrating at times.  They want their labs and everything to work perfectly, but these are little humans we are dealing with.

This little girl, less than one year old, has been in the hospital almost a week.  She hasn't been eating because she had surgery on her belly and it wasn't quite ready for food.  So, she's been getting nutrition through her iv's; all well and good, except that the poor little girl has terrible veins.  Over the course of the week, between lab draws and IV sticks, she'd probably been stuck over forty times.  The docs just didn't see a problem with that.  They didn't have to listen to the baby cry as she got stuck over and over; they didn't have to see the tears of helplessness and frustration fall from mom's eyes.  Sad!

Today they wanted us to stick her for yet another iv and all her veins were used up.  Mom was fed up and fought for a central line (which is a surgically placed line and longer lasting), and we had to fight and plead our case with the doctors, too.  Finally when her blood sugar dropped too low and we couldn't get an IV, they let us start feeding her.

Mom was a champ in my eyes; she stood up for her little girl and made sure enough was enough.  Those are my kind of parents; she even tried to apologize to us for being so difficult.  We told her to never apologize for standing up for her one year old!  I know doctors have tough decisions to make and a hard job, too.  It would be nice, though, if they argued a little less with us nurses and had more faith in our assessment and judgement skills.  And it would be nice if they would listen to the parents a little more closely because really, who knows the patient better than her own mother?