work and such

I realize that an update on how my job is going post-orientation is long overdue. The first couple of days were really hard. I suffered from massive information overload after 12 hours of everything being new. Next week will be my fifth week and I'm finally starting to feel comfortable with the daily routine. I've had a lot of really great patients and even a few patients that other people found difficult but I didn't have any problems with.

The most exciting thing that happened (and I don't use exciting in the positive sense of the word, it was actually a little scary) was I had a baby (the boy in a set of twins, who was also a whole pound bigger than his sister at birth) who dropped his temperature and had to go under the warmer. As he was warming up, we thought it would be a good idea to check his oxygen sats because he was breathing kind of funny. So we put him on the monitor and he was fine, then the nurse that I was working with left me in the nursery with him...and his sats started to drop...yikes! Luckily there was another nurse there, but she was dealing with another baby who wasn't doing very well. However, she was able to answer my questions while I was standing there not really knowing what to do. Anyway, the baby was fine, turns out his blood sugar was a little low because he was too sleepy to eat. It was very scary to be in a situation and not really know what to do or when to really start worrying.

In another couple of weeks I'm moving from the post-partum unit to nights on the prenatal unit for eight weeks. It's kind of like school...just when you start getting comfortable with something, they change things on you!