Normally, I would start blogs with an introduction of myself and what not, but I feel like just jumping in. Introductions will have to wait until my next post. Today was our first day hitting the floors on the pediatric unit. Nervous was an understatement. Love children! Sick kids scare me. That combined with parents of sick children is like a heart attack for me. We didn't get the chance to medication administration today because none of us took the math med test yet, so our day went a little easy. Nonetheless, I got to do more on my first day than expected.
My patient was a 7 month old male who was admitted for failure to thrive (FTT). He wasn't doing well with oral feedings, so he went into surgery and got a G-tube placement yesterday. Basically, my day just consisted of managing and assessing IV infusion and site. I was able to hang an enteral feeding (pedialyte) through his G.tube. By the time I got on the unit, he had had over 1,000 cc of fluids and had only voided 50 cc since yesterday. An order was put in for a urinary catheter. I've only done adults, so it was a little scary with this little guy. Had some trouble, but my instructor helped me out. We were able to get 45 cc of urine.
We started to see some swelling in his face. Then one of my worst nightmares happened. His mother came back and started to flip out because of the swelling. My instructor tried to explain that it was not because he's getting too much fluids (She shut off his feeding pump!) but because he's within 24 ours post op and he third spacing the fluids. One of the NP's from the PICU came up and explaiined everything that we tried to and all was well again. Unfortunately, I feel that in some cases patients still feel that nurses are not credible. SO that was my day...
I'll be starting home care this week, so we'll see how that goes...until then, peace out!
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