Pediatrics: The Nursery
March 2, 1999
Tuesday
Nursery rotation is divided into two: the delivery room duty and the nursery (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, as it is technically called).
Delivery room duty is 24 hours, in which one does not see the light of day. The intern is just cooped up in the small “transition nursery” near the labor room most of the time. When a baby comes out, he is then suctioned in the mouth and nose, dried and stimulated to breathe (first cry). Babies are not spanked in the butt anymore to make them cry, rubbing the back and flicking (making “pitik”) the feet are the current means of stimulating the baby. After this, the baby is measured and weighed. Sometimes the intern has to bring several patients to the nursery (which is quite far) from the delivery room. The babies are placed in a bassinet and wheeled up to the 4th-floor nursery It looks like the intern had shopped for babies and placed them in a cart (the bassinet). They are so cute. There are non-cute babies also, like those who have hydrocephalus (big heads) and intubated babies (endo-tracheal tube). Unfortunately, there are patients like this in the nursery, too.
Nursery duty (which isn’t really duty) starts at 7:30 AM and ends at 5 PM. Blood extractions here are done by the residents since there was an incident last year resulting in the patient’s right wrist becoming gangrenous. Yuck. So now only the residents are allowed to do the neonate’s blood extractions (which is good for me, since I hate sticking needles into little babies). So what is the intern’s role in life at this point? Manong/manang (orderly). We bring down the lab specimens, schedule X-rays, etc.
The babies usually do not have bantays, or watchers, so it is the intern who does ail the legwork. How medical and how fulfilling (sarcastic). One thing good though, is we can now lose all the excess pounds by going up and down the stairs. We also monitor the blood glucose (sugar) of infants who are not feeding This is very tedious, since you have to prick the heel and let blood flow, put a drop of blood on a special strip which reacts to the presence of sugar in the blood. The strip is about 8 mm wide, but we cut it into 1-mm strips to save the patient some money.
End of nursery rotation. Did not learn much, but at least I know how to resuscitate a newly-born baby (kinda).
26 days to go in pediatrics!
JOINT is the Journal of INTernship, a series of email messages to family and friends (“journal subscribers”) written during my yearlong medical internship from May 1, 1998 to April 30, 1999. Internship is one of the requirements before taking the Philippine Physician Licensure Examination (also known as the Medical Boards). Journal entries were edited for clarity in January, 2020. Read more about it in the first blog post, Introducing JOINT.
