Some People

When I was in the hospital with Boo, overall, I got royal treatment. Our hospital is small. There is no Pediatric Unit, so she was on the med surg floor. She was the only person under 75 so she was pretty spoiled with attention as well. I absolutely loved the day shift. They brought me books, snacks, and came in every once in a while just to see how I was doing. The night shift on the other hand.....

The first night we were there the whole tone changed at shift change. I don't know if they were ticked about the extra hour they had to work due to turning the clocks back or what. I shut my door and tried to settle down for the night. These people were by the book. They came in the room what felt like every 30 minutes. They took the baby's temperature, checked her vitals, restarted her IV, weighed her diapers. It was ridiculous as her doc had already said we didn't need to do that.

At one point, around 4 am, I woke up and there were several nurses in the room. I was a little disoriented and I didn't recognize one of them as even working in this particular unit. We went on to have the following conversation:

Her: How old is your baby?
Me: She's 3 months old.
Her: Hmmm, she looks a lot bigger than that.
Me: blank stare, who the heck is this lady?
Her: She's having emesis?
Me: What? Yeah, she's throwing up.
Her: Do you think she's vomiting, or do you think she's swallowing air and spitting up?
Me: thinking maybe this lady should have gone on for the MD as obviously her passion is in diagnosing patients she has never met. All of my girls are sick right now, her doctor is fairly convinced she has the same thing.
Her: Hmmmmm
Me: Dimming the light and covering the baby and I up. She's exhausted and has had some trouble sleeping. AKA get the heck out of my room.

She got the hint and scurried off to harass someone else. One of the other night nurses wouldn't quit taking the baby's temperature with one of those ear thermometers. I was fairly sure she had a fever. She was hot to the touch, fussy, and very uncomfortable. This nurse disagreed, took the temperature with the ear thing, and pronounced her cool with a temp of 98.9. As soon as she left I took her temperature with the rectal thermometer and it was 102. Finally she got some fever reducing medication.

This was only a small part of our experience. Like I said before the day shift was great and I really like the baby's Pediatrician. Hopefully we'll get to spend a little time apart!