Sleepless...And Not in Seattle

Hello, dear blog readers! Four night shifts down and one more to go before I'm off for five days! Hooray. These five-shift groupings have GOT to go.

There's something about working on Halloween that always seems to bring in more patients, even than other holidays where the goofies come out of the woodwork (i.e. the psych ward patients claiming they're pregnant/in labor around Thanksgiving and Christmas). We had huge rainfall, and when I came on the unit, we had 10 labor patients with three more on the way. (We only have six labor rooms in L&D). Fortunately, we put some of the pretermers in post-partum for a few hours, and the rest we had to triage and let them labor in the hallway for a while until we had a couple of deliveries. I felt really bad for those women; having been in labor, there is something of a need for privacy when you're in pain and all you can do is sit or stand around a bench with other women in the same boat.

Last Halloween, I distinctly recall we had a code of one of my favorite babies (I had taken care of her for three weeks), and although she was not my patient at the time, the unit was still stressful. While she was coding, I helped admit another really sick cardiac baby who ended up needing ECMO (a machine that filters the blood, reoxygenates, etc. so that the heart and lungs literally can stop and we can still preserve life).

I think next year I'll try and get Halloween off. Spending it with a toddler collecting candy from local businesses definitely sounds like more fun to me.

Pictures of our little "Trick or Treater" to follow when I get them uploaded. First, some sleep!