My NICU Nurse And I

An Oregon Nurse's Association Christmas party I attended with my wife recently has prompted me to shed more light on the NICU nurses in the Rogue Valley. There was a recent documentary on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit challenges and daily routine in the Rogue Regional Hospital run by Asante in Medford where my wife works and has worked for many years. She spent many years on night shift and now is on day shift, sometimes as a favorite charge nurse. I can't say enough good things about her and her work.

I will say that it is a unique skill set these nurses have, to fight for lives of mostly premature infants and other very sick babies. Monitors going off all the time demanding some kind of response, performing near-surgical interventions, administering just the right combinations of medications and keeping track of everything involved very precisely. Not to mentions the gentle and caring feeding and other nurturing tricks and emotional support of their charges. And the emotional support and advice given the new parents.

Teamwork is essential. Even though the nurses are the point of the spear, there are neonatologists, the doctors of this specialty, respiratory therapists, eye doctors that come in to check the newborns, other specialists, other support staff, hospital management, and union folks.

That last one brings me to the more personal side of this occupation, and in particular, the Rogue Regional Medical Center NICU nurses, of which I'm becoming more familiar all the time. I'll take the Christmas party at the Mountain View Winery, put on by the ONA, as a prime example. One can hardly help but think that there should be a reality show featuring the dramatic and stressful work and destressing activities of these nurses. In a word, these are fun people.

There was a band at the gathering Saturday night and irrespective of the generous tip Terry had me leave for the band, and the wine steward, the band was sorry to see the NICU nurses leave. I'm sure our table was the most happening place in town that night. One party wasn't enough fun, they had to join their occasional co-workers, the OB nurses, for the fun they were having at a more public venue. Of course it didn't hurt that the ONA footed the bill for dinner and unlimited libations from the best that Mountain View had in their cellars.

The drummer commented that it was a special pleasure to play for such a lively, and also good looking, bunch. I totally agreed on all points. The husbands were there as well, and that is another key to these girls' success. The men are all supportive of their administering angels to almost a fault. We can see best what they go through day to day. It takes two to do this job. Although I know plenty who are single, often because they are just too busy for the prerequisites to hooking up and maybe feel they are too busy for the maintenance work afterwards. It's a sad situation for both the nurses and the Mr. rights that just haven't appeared.

The night shifts, like the day shifts, are twelve hours long, but additionally screw with the circadian rhythms. This is not good for their health by any stretch. It looks to me like a slow grinding down process. There is a high incidence of breast cancer among the NICU nurses. Terry and I joke that God must have gotten a good laugh, putting an allopathic practitioner together with a natural remedy kind of guy. Although when I came along about ten years ago, she stopped getting malignant moles on her skin. And she's losing weight she gained as one result of working night shifts for a dozen years.

We pretty much eat like Tibetan monks anymore. Me more so. But Terry is coming around. My chiropractor diagnosed me with gluten and caffeine intolerance a few years ago, and that abstinance has been rubbing off on her too. I've started to grow big gardens to get away from the GMOs and bug sprays, etc. My research to help her has led me to drink a tall glass of slightly warm water with sweetener and 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda first thing in the morning and again at night. I rinse my teeth after brushing with colloidal silver and swallow it to also keep any disease germs from replicating. These things help Terry when she needs the extra boost Even though she usually thinks about a pill first, I can get her to take something natural more and more, because it works, is cheaper, and has no side-effect.  

This was supposed to be a glimpse into the personal lives of the NICU nurses here, but that's maybe more that I can bite off. Besides I'm more of a technical writer. I would like it to get some more treatment sometime, preferably in video format, because of it's importance. There are 20 million kids who are looked after by NICUs in the U.S. every year. Most of them would die without 24/7 NICU nurse care. There aren't enough doctors for this demand and no lay people would know how to do even routine care on a new arrival at a birth weight of a pound and a half. The NICU nurse is trained specifically for the job. Terry says she doesn't know how to care for big people and doesn't want to. Her whole being fits the demands of this job to a 't'. Like most of the others she is tough and confident in her skills when she needs to advocate for the patient. Sometimes to other staff, including doctors, that aren't doing the direct care, and have other ideas for immediate interventions. And they have to be the most gentle and skilled when threading a tiny tube through a preemie's vein to deliver drugs right to the heart. It's a highly specialized field. Some NICU doctors might think the nurses are there to help them, some nurses might feel it's the other way around. But here in the Rogue valley I don't think anyone harbors these thoughts; it's a team effort.

Terry's first job as a nurse was at Los Angles County Hospital, you know the one they used the picture of at the start of the TV show, General Hospital. I was relieved when she backed off her desire to be on the transport team here. The transport team here goes with the ambulance and airplane to pick up kids from other Southern Oregon and Northern California hospitals. She had described rushing a baby to a hospital that was 'coding,' through Los Angeles traffic at 80 mph in the dividing lane. It's an adrenaline rush, but the satisfaction of saving a life in the most direct way, in the back of a vehicle, was very satisfying. I've only helped save one life, a man that flipped his truck on Hwy 101. His truck was burning and he was strapped in upside down. Got him out with 20 seconds to spare, very satisfying, but only one. I can imagine the satisfaction these nurses have saving thousands. I noticed right away when I met Terry that she likes adventure like I do and is one to jump in and get the job done.

A group of the NICU nurses and a NICU doctor get away on scrapbooking retreats on a regular basis. I think Terry orchestrated this. No guy wants to be involved in this, take my word for it. They have their own way of letting off steam, and it's a wonder of the world. The nurses do a lot of things to let off steam. I'm really only familiar with my nurse however. She regularly goes to bunko parties, bible studies, get-togethers with friends and family, road trips, and conventions. Much of this includes other nurses. They're a pretty tight group. They seem to have only one speed, full bore ahead. Work hard and play hard, that seems to be their motto.

The nurses have code words to help keep an emotional even keel. Terry uses 'badly behav'n' for, stopping breathing, heart stoppage, or some other life threatening emergency. The preemies under a couple pounds she calls 'the littles.' The ones out of the real danger zone, but too little to go home, she calls the 'feeders and growers.' These last ones are what she coined as the 'snow-pack,' or, the patient population that remains fairly steady. Their hospital in Medford built a four million dollar addition for the NICU to better serve the growing regional population, and sometimes they push the upper limits of the expanded capacity. It takes 60 nurses to make the NICU work here. To be clear, it's the only one in a large radius.

I offer this blog post as a toast to Terry and her fellow nurses since I didn't offer one with wine the other night. I really enjoyed meeting the night shift and their hubbies Saturday night. It was epic, and in my mind, marketable in itself. I know the hospital management wouldn't view it that way, especially since their union meets across the table from them on occasion. Three cheers to the NICU nurses of the Rogue Regional Medical Center.