Wound Vac's, Observations, and Cute Babies!

Hey everyone, a late Happy Valentine’s Day to you! I hope everyone enjoyed the 14th, I spent the whole day at the NICU, where it was actually very festive. The entire area outside and inside the facility was decorated with red, pink, and white hearts and other cute Valentine's’ decorations.

Anyways, this week I shadowed bedside nurses, who are the nurses that directly care for the babies on a day to day basis in every aspect. This includes feeding, diaper changing, giving oral or IV medications, regulating blood pressure, temperature, and oxygen levels, comforting, and almost anything else that the baby needs. When I arrived, the first thing I observed was a nearly hour long procedure in which the nurses were tending to a baby who had gastroschisis. Gastroschisis is abdominal birth defect in which infants are born with parts of their digestive system, most commonly the intestines, protruding outside of their body. Real life pictures of this condition can be difficult to look at for some people, so here is a picture that gives the idea:

An Infant who has Gastroschisis. 

This particular baby endured a few surgeries earlier in the week and week before to treat the gastroschisis and her nurses were attempting to attach a wound vac to the affected area. A wound vac is machine used to perform Negative-Pressure Wound Therapy, which is technique in which a vacuum of a controlled atmospheric state is used to aid the healing of acute or chronic wounds by attaching the vacuum pump to a sealed wound dressing. I hope that wasn’t too confusing, but here is what a wound vac looks like:

Wound Vac

During this entire procedure, the baby was sleeping peacefully and only moved a couple times. I was stunned by the amount of delicacy and precision the nurses used to perform this procedure. This is similar to what it looked like after it finished:

An attached Wound Vac

Later on, one of the nurses showed me their daily routine to care for the babies. Although every patient has a slightly different routine, there is a general one that almost every patient undergoes. Every few hours, the nurse takes the infant's temperature, changes the diaper, warms the formula to be fed to the baby through a tube that is attached to the baby’s mouth, alters the position the baby is sleeping in, and anything else specific to the patient’s needs.

While I witnessed this process multiple times, I did actually observe one time in particular in which the father of the baby assisted the nurse in this daily routine. He took the temperature, talked to his child, and helped in changing the diaper and feeding the baby. What the nurse later told me as the father was holding his child is that although it can be difficult sometimes for parents to understand how delicate the situation can be, they prioritize the family’s participation and encourage the parents to be involved in every step of the way. They also advocate for parent/child contact and for the parents to hold the child when possible. She told me that although she does try to implement the principles of family centered care as much as she can, there are limitations in certain situations in which either the parents are not in the proper condition or the child is an state that is too delicate. The example she gave was that if a parent or family member who is a regular smoker comes without cleaning himself or herself completely of the evidence of cigarettes, the nurses would restrict the parent from having close physical contact with their child.

Besides those moments, one of the highlights of this week was when I was watching a nurse trying to make a baby who was born more than 14 to 15 weeks premature go to sleep. As the baby was only born a few weeks earlier, she was still so tiny that half of her body fit in the nurse’s hand!

The nurse was singing a lullaby to the baby, and the smile that the baby had while she fell asleep gripping the nurse’s pointer finger with her tiny hands is definitely one of the cutest I’ve ever seen.

I definitely learned a LOT this past week and I’m excited for next week!
Thanks for reading!