baby baby baby oh baby

As I sit next to an open warmer tonight next to a sleeping baby, my mind is thinking about what I have to accomplish tommarrow morning. I am helping to throw a friend a baby shower which I have started to become an expert at. First its the wedding showers, then the baby showers, then I guess the over the hill showers, and then your throwing your own children their wedding showers and the cycle starts again. I have moved past the wedding phase of my life other then the fact that I am not married. Im starting to think I should bypass the wedding all together and jump ahead with my friends to the baby phase. I have stayed up enough with screaming babies to handle things myself, right!?! Oh but wait, I can't give them the good stuff at home. What will I do without my ativan, morphine, fentanyl, or versed? I'm going to be one of those mothers that uses tylenol and benedryl for irritability. So I am making lettuce wraps for the shower tomarrow. I got the great idea from the best wraps I've ever had at the cheesecake factory. I even went and bought their sauces. They should be awesome and the presentation will be amazing, with the green bib lettuce, orange carrots in red cabbage. Green, orange, and purple are great colors together. Oh and I have red peppers- fabulous! I also made a take home gift for everyone. Homemade fudge balls dipped in blue and white chocolate boxed up with an initialized tag. Yes it has been a lot of work, and yes everyone around me thinks I'm crazy, but honestly I enjoy it. I do it because it's fun- I could go buy gifts for eveyone or have the party catered for the same expense, but then creativity goes out the window. That is one of my passions. My sister reminded me of the last baby shower we did that was even more over the top. We not only did fudge balls, but miniture baby soaps for take home gift. Oh and we hand made individualized chicken pot pies that had criss cross crusted tops- oh and we did a rose ball that we hung from the table, plus my sister designed the invitations, and tags for the take home gifts- so I can be over the top and a perfectionist if you didn't know that about me. The hardest part about getting the lettuce wraps prepared tomarrow will be that I have worked all night. Oh well, I will crash and burn after the shower. Oh but wait I have a birthday party to go to. One of the babies I took care of a year ago is having a first birthday party. He was naughty too. He tried to die several times. Finally proof that what I do at my job pays off. Baby, baby, baby, oh baby!

heres a little something

So I have to admit, I've been spending more time on facebook then on blogspot lately- Big mistake and it will never happen again! it Is midnight and I have to work at 7 A so this will be short and sweet- Just want you to know I'm still alive and will try to think of something funny to blog about- life is kind of serious boring at the moment- oh but I do have fun at work!

It's pretty much LADIES NIGHT every night in the NICU

Human Balloons

So here is the before and after work shot of my lovely legs! Apparently I spend most of the time on my feet. If it's Saturday night, I get so excited to try and fit into my Sunday shoes in the morning. Fellow church mates-You might notice my feet loping over the sides of my shoes if you look closely, but don't. I'm self conscious about it. Interestingly enough I learned that it is possible to get so edematous, that if you poked a hole in your skin, you would actually burst like a balloon. Trust me, I saw one of my patients do this. The infant lost over 200 grams in one night. It was "the incredible shrinking baby!" Maybe that's what I will do before church sunday mornings- a few pins should work!

BEFORE


AFTER

Saturday Night Live or Reality?

Recently at work as I sat in the lounge, 2 am, I was entertained by none other then Nancy Grace. Sadly enough there was nothing funny about her breaking news story, yet everyone there was laughing. Why? Can you say dramatic. Now I have known her to be a little weird, but she's crazy! She sat and told us about a brand new baby that had been put into a dumpster and found alive. What could have been explained in a short 2 mins took over an hour. She went into great detail about how the baby was actually found and of course interviewed the guy who saved the baby! Wesley Focker, no joke. Wesley sat and talked about how when he heard the baby crying when he was about to dump his grass into the dumpster from his lawn mower. He yelled for the neighbors to come out of their house an listen to get a second opinion on the sound. Heaven forbid just look into the dumpster yourself. Then Nancy continued to emphasize the fact that the baby had not just been placed in the garbage can but systematically left in a design of sticks and vegetation. Ironically this was the first thing Focker noticed when he looked into the garbage, how organized the trash was! Yeah right. Focker kept saying how the baby probably survived because of the heat given off from the decompensation of the vegetation. Two words I'm sure he had never heard of until the News brodcast. Oh but the drama of having the baby still attached to the placenta and how that was going to effect the baby's life forever. Nancy was just sure, though the baby was listed in "good" condition at the hospital, it would die from the cord not being cut. And through this whole tradgedy and miraculous rescue, the only thing that Nancy could compare it to was the miracle of the birth of her twins. She intermitently posted pictures of her with her twins. Unreal. I was sure I was watching Saturday Night Live!

Vegas

SO I finally made my run for the strip. Despite a lot of patience, I finally gave up on you Laura! But don't worry, I'm realizing I need to do it more for my sanity. I took my cousin for her 30th birthday. Can you say shop till you drop. I did a total of 12 hours shopping straight one day, (thats a shift at work). Hitting 3 malls including outlets. I dragged my cousin Alexandra around. At one point I even tried to dress Alexandra from head to toe. I just couldn't do the sunglasses. FASHION POLICE!

When she was done she said, "hmm, I look like you!" She was not interested in any of my picks.

Needless to say I found plenty for the taking!

After the shopping there was only one thing left to do: Practice our pucker

Unfortunately, in the end, our practice went to waste. My romantic night in Vegas remained just an illusion!

Failure

So I didn't know it could be so difficult to give a dose of Methadone, but apparently for someone brilliant like me it can take 3 different doses. As I pulled the Methadone out of the accudose, I thought: I will just squirt this in the cap of the syringe and draw it up rather then going to get a med cup. As I released the med it went into the cap and then immediately to the floor. The nurse across the hall was standing there looking at me like I was an idiot. So I asked her to witness that it was on the floor and I didn't just go into the hallway and inject it into myself. I pull a second dose out and draw it up, from a med cup, into the oral syringe like I had done all night. I had never given methadone IV and most of the other drugs I was giving to this patient were oral. As I showed this same nurse my dose, she asked why I was giving this IV methadone orally? Yah, thats right. I had been giving all the IV methadone orally that night. I guess I do deserve to be called a moron sometimes. To make matters worse, I could no longer use this dose of methadone because now it was unsterile and I would have to go to a different accudose to get a dose, being I just wasted the last one. Now you know why I have been struggling with my mouth lately. It is times like these that I wonder why I am a nurse and want to quit.
So being so on top of my game, I went running with my mom and the dogs. When we got to the bottom of memory grove where the pond was there was a little duckling who had gotten separated from it's mom and was trying to swim against the force of the water to keep from being pushed over through the metal bars and down under the street. As we watched this poor little duck, we knew it's fate if we didn't do something. I decided we would have my dog Lucy go in and chase the duckling to the side. Well Lucy did a great job chasing it. Suddenly this lady comes running up to me yelling NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I tried to calm her down, but she wouldn't listen. As she continued to scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I yelled back at her and said, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we are trying to save the duck!" I think she was surprised by my reaction and then quietly started cheering for the dog. Lucy got the duckling into her mouth and my mom grabbed it from her. Yeah, we saved the duck. Even crazy lady was cheering and yelling "Good dog"! As I made my way over to where my mom and the duck were, my mom looked distressed. The duck that was alive after the rescue, suddenly decided to die. It lay limp in her hand. No bite marks, just probably stunned from the whole situation. I started compressions but I failed. The duckling died and it was my fault. This just added to the failure of a day it had been. I could not bring myself to throw the duckling into the garbage or leave it for a dog to eat, so I took it home and buried it. I don't know, I guess it was just my way of showing respect for life. I hope everybody else's day went better then mine!