Quarterlife Crisis

So far I have learned how to do infant massage on the babies and got to massage 2 little babies today. One little girl weighed 5 lb. at birth and she was so tiny! It was kind of surreal to hold her and realize that I was smaller than that when I was born! 

Another thing that I am learning to do in the NICU is getting the car seat adjusted to the baby and setting the baby up for the car seat test. Every NICU baby must sit in his/her car seat for at least 30 minutes to make sure they can breathe and not have any episodes of no breathing, etc. So I've been learning how to do that too.

We have had some interesting babies to say the least. One baby was born earlier in the week with gastroscesis--basically her intestines were outside of her body (yuck I know). They had a clear plastic bag hanging above her little body with the intestines enclosed. They would close off a little bit of the bag each day so gravity could push it all in. By today, it was all inside! Kinda cool :)

There is another baby that has been in the NICU for 9 months! She finally gets discharged next week. We will have a graduation celebration for her with lots of streamers and gifts :)

Several of the babies have older siblings, so we do sibling support with those kiddos. We had two of the big sisters yesterday afternoon for some sibling time. The hospital had a special Memorial Day service yesterday where there was supposed to be an airplane flyover. Well we promised the kids they would get to see the cool airplanes--only the airplanes never showed up :( At least they had cake for us instead!

Today the children's hospital had a special presentation by the Kleenex Nascar driver (I can't remember his name--I'm not a Nascar fan, but this is Nascar country!) and Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Some of the kids got to get the driver's signature and take a picture with the car. The other intern Kathryn and I even got our picture taken haha!

I'm excited for next week to start so I can be more actively involved in things that the Child Life Specialist does. This week has been mostly orientation and getting acclimated to everything in the NICU. Next week I'll begin doing more on my own, which will be fun. If only I could adjust to the 7am work day! At least that is only 3 days a week, and the other days start at 11:30 :) Too bad this is just for 3 weeks....then the 6am OR rotation starts in June :(