It feels good to hit a major milestone in pregnancy - viability. Not that I've ever had any problem with preterm labor or any kind of pregnancy loss, but getting to the point where there is a possibility that the baby could live should I deliver now is comforting a bit. Even though the difficulties that a 24 week baby would face would be huge.
Work this weekend was absolutely exhausting. It's like the phone wouldn't stop ringing, and I couldn't seem to keep up with everything I needed to do. every time I thought I was almost caught up, the phone would ring. I swear, every time we turned around it was the ER letting us know we had yet another patient. And twice when the tech went to bring the patient up, she'd come back with 2! Saturday was the worst. There we 4 patients for me and the other labor nurse (third had be put 'on call' due to decreased census at the time). Two of the patients needed to be admitted. Then the phone rang 5 minutes later, with a patient that turned out to be 2 patients waiting to come up. Then within the next 30 minutes, we got 2 more patients. A total of 6 admissions for 2 nurses. Luckily they called the on-call girl in and she got there very quickly. Everyone seemed to have spotting, high blood pressure or ruptured membranes but not contracting. We figured by midnight, we had admitted 8 patients, and by 7a.m, we had admitted 14 patients and discharged 8. This may not be really busy on some units but we are a fairly small department with 7 labor rooms and a 4 bed triage/monitoring rom. Last night wasn't much better. But, man does 12 hours fly when you are going full speed all night! I slept for 6 hours straight today! A big feat for a pregnant woman who usually gets up to pee about every 3-4 hours!
1 comment:
I used to work in a smaller unit, like yours...and I miss it sometimes! We would do 30-50 deliveries per month. Where I'm at now, we do 400+ deliveries per month!
Post a Comment