Written 2/6/11
I had a baby on my unit, a beautiful baby girl with bright eyes that crinkled into a smile whenever someone made her neon-orange stuffed tiger growl around her crib. She giggles like an angel and everyone on the unit melts when she coos. Her mother hasn’t been to see her even once this week. And even though I’m not there to judge parents and how well (or not so well) they take care of their children, a small part of me hated the people that brought her into the world and didn’t seem to make the time or effort to be with her in it.
Across the room from me, I watched a man speak softly to a little baby girl in his arms. He told her she was beautiful and spoke of the home he and his wife would be taking her to. After laying her down, he turned to me with the funniest, clueless expression because he didn’t know how to wrap her properly in the crib. He didn’t once whisper to her how he and his wife would help to wean her off a drug addiction passed on by her own mother but spoke of the non-related siblings she was to inherit once she left the hospital. This man was not her father, but he clearly loved her like one.
It was an overwhelmingly tender moment that brought tears to my eyes.
My First Week of my Employment Adventure was filled with moments like that, littered with giggling coos and cautiously loving touches through openings in (what I like to call) “baby incubators.”
People, myself included, take healthy children for granted. We see them running around everywhere so we learn to think that they all come into the world as happy as we see them. We don’t think about the ones that spend months in hospitals and clinics, or of the ones who hardly (if ever) see or even understand what goes on at the other side of their bedroom windows.
Parents get a little crazy when they find out there’s something wrong with their child. I learned it was about the “loss of a perfect child,” when parents realize that this image of the child they wanted is never going to happen, and it turns parents away from their child; makes them love the child less because it’s not what they were expecting or wanting in the nine months of cravings, weight gain, and hormones.
So when parents come in anyway and look down at these children of a lesser god with the love you expect parents to give their children, it’s a very special thing.
On my first day, it was god-awful. There were so many systems to get accustomed to, protocols to learn, equipment to find. “Overwhelming” would’ve been an epic understatement. My preceptor has pretty much decided that the best way to teach me is to throw me into a figurative pit of wolves, give me a butter knife, and sit back and wait to critique my every movement. Awesome sauce. At the end of the day, I walked outside, realizing that I had gone through 24 hours without yet seeing sunlight. I mean, I know I’m a bit vampiric with my sleep schedule, but this was ridiculous. Realizing that I’d need to drive before I could actually pass out, I climbed up a flight of stairs and sat down in my car, wincing since I’d somehow forgotten that my legs could bend, having spent the majority of the last 12 hours on my feet. I went home, barely wrote an “update” and snuggled into my bed, dreading having to get up in a matter of hours.
Day two was a little better, but still pretty effin’ stressful. I managed to handle myself well enough with a few documenting issues along the way. I ended the day calmer than the previous one and managed to get my first ever paycheck on the way out. Not gonna lie, I was insanely pleased with myself clutching that little pay stub, imagining all the really awesome and badass stuff I’d do/buy/enjoy once I cashed it in.
…and then I remembered that I actually owe money and get a lot less happy.
Day three was smooth…well as smooth as rocky road ice cream; you relish the crunchy because it’s pretty damn good. The challenges that I experienced in the first two days blew by me like nothing and the end of the day came under the hum of a largely uneventful, but satisfying day, with me going home knowing that, not only was my first week done, but that I’d survived it without doing serious bodily harm to my patients (a worry that plagues me more often than not).
All in all, it could’ve gone worse, but it didn’t. And the simple thought of it brings me an insane amount of pride in myself.
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