Hi everyone! Happy Friday and I hope everyone had a great week!
Since my last post, a few things have changed in relation to my Senior Project. Unfortunately, I no longer will be traveling to India. :(
I know, I’m sad about it too, but you know what people sometimes say, when one door closes, another opens! And that’s exactly what happened! Along with shadowing at the NICU facility, I will also be working with Dr. Vegunta of Banner Health Pediatric Surgery at Cardon Children’s Medical Center. I’m very grateful for Dr. Vegunta for this opportunity and for allocating his time to guide me. I got to meet with him this past Monday, and hopefully I will be able to start as an observer soon!
Along with that, this week was also my first week within the NICU! I got to shadow a PCA, a patient care assistant, so that I could get a proper tour and orientation of the entire NICU. As he was a veteran to this NICU facility, I shadowed him for the majority of the time. For all of you soccer/football fans, he's a huge Liverpool FC fan and even had a tattoo on his arm with the team logo!
He gave me a detailed breakdown of the entire NICU and showed me all the jobs that a NICU PCA does. Along with taking and mixing specific formula orders for infants within and outside of the NICU and transporting materials requested by nurses, PCA’s also assist nurses and families with patient discharges and by caring for the babies while the family is absent.
I also showed another PCA who was feeding a baby as she told me all about the sad misfortune that many babies suffer through because of drugs. Informally called “drug babies”, these infants are those that could be fully or almost completely healthy but are not because their mother took drugs while pregnant. Because of this, some of these babies either become addicted to the drug and suffer withdrawals after being born. Depending on the drug the mother took and the amount they took, these infants must be given regularly morphine to control their withdrawals until they slowly lose the need for it. As these babies are newborns and are very delicate, they cannot be given morphine through an IV and are instead must be fed morphine with a syringe. Here’s a picture I found online of baby receiving morphine, so that you can have a better idea of what I mean.
Hearing and seeing this broke my heart, as these little babies would have completely fine and with their families at home had their mother not taken drugs while pregnant.
Anyways, thank you for reading about my experiences during the first week!
Anyways, thank you for reading about my experiences during the first week!
